Saturday Vocab

“Hey! Come on over here and pick some of this stuff up. There’s no shortage of it to clean up,” I called over to the boy.

“What does that even mean?” he replied as he started walking over.

He came over and scooped up a handful of the amalgam of twigs, leaves, dead grass, moss and whatever other seasonings might be present. He then tossed it into the wheelbarrow. He obviously understood enough.

We were working in the yard, finally getting to the thorough cleaning it needed after the past Fall and Winter seasons. There were shards of pine trees, pieces of branches and lots of other evidence of the toll the past couple of seasons had taken. Over on the side, there was an upper half to a pine big pine tree. The piece that had snapped off was one side of a fork that split the main tree, about 20 feet up. The fork itself was about 50 feet long or so and probably 20 inches around at it’s thickest.

When it landed, it pretty much crushed all the smaller brush and trees in it’s way. The part of the fork that would have been the top of the tree landed partially in our yard and was the messiest part. There were shattered limbs strewn about in a radius around where the broken tree had landed.

The boy was helping me clean all those pieces up. I use “help” in a somewhat loose sense of the term. Right now, for boring jobs like yard cleanup that can’t possible hope to hold a child’s attention, I get about 5 minutes worth of effort before he wanders off to do something else.

A year ago, I would have let him go. This year, I’ve resolved to hound him to keep helping. He’s more than old enough to start learning to finish a job once it’s started. Even the boring ones.

Especially the boring ones.

I don’t know how many times he’d wandered off prior to this last time, but I’d maintained my patience well enough. We were nearing the end of the job, but there was still plenty to pick up.

I considered his question for a moment. My request was simple enough, what was there to confuse him? The only thing I could think of was the word “shortage.”

“Do you know what shortage means?” I asked.

“Yeah, it’s when you run out of electricity,” he answered.

Interesting. He was wrong, but somewhere along the way, he’d obviously picked up on the term “short” as it refers to electricity. It was doubtful he knew exactly what a “short” was, but he knew its result.

“Oh wait,” he blurted, “That’s like, a short circuit. No, I don’t know what shortage means.”

Well, at least he’d figured that much out on his own. “A shortage is when there is not a lot of something,” I explained. “So when I say there is no shortage of something, what does that mean?”

He paused to consider for a moment, then said “It means, like, there’s no not a lot of something.” Then he just kind of stared at me. The double negative seemed to have tripped him up.

“Annnnnnnnnnnnd…” I prompted.

“Annnnnnnnnd… that … means … there is a lot of something?” His voice rose and trailed off as he completed his question, like he had a tenuous grasp on the meaning but wasn’t totally sure of himself.

“Exactly,” I confirmed for him.

We continued picking things up. He asked if “shortage” could be used to refer to a “short circuit.” I told him no, they were 2 different things.

I raked things into a pile, he’d scoop them up and deposit the scoop in the wheelbarrow. When we got down to the final bits, the boy observed “Looks like there’s a shortage now, huh Dad?”