I used to mow and rake our lawn. Sometimes my dad would do the mowing but that was usually after he'd ask me to do it on Friday night and be pissed because it was all of 8am on Saturday and uncompleted. The scene played out with me running out the front door after hurriedly getting dressed and begging to take over and finish the job. As I got older, I dressed slower and ceased to beg.
Our home in Hampton had a couple of HUGE pine trees in the front yard and several slightly smaller ones on one side. We did not have leaves to rake but had to scrape a ton of pine needles from the lawn. We moved into the house in November so did not do much in the yard until that spring. We started to rake the side yard and about 10 feet from the house we realized that our lawn was not level but was in fact years of accumulated pine needle growth to the tune of about 2 feet! We uncovered "rocks" that were easily 2-3 feet in diameter too that were likely left over from when the house was built.
I was around 13 when my dad decided that we should cut down all the trees in the side yard, move the rocks, and fill in the area that started 10 feet from the house and extended to the stone wall 25 feet away. My job was to move the rocks, by hand. I am still not sure how I managed to rock, roll, pivot, and drag those rocks out of the yard. My dad then had yards of fill delivered.
I spread that entire amount of fill by hand. Menial labor was my birthright as the only boy in the family. I used a shovel and a rake to distribute and evenly spread the fill. After I was done with spreading the fill, he had loam delivered and I did the same thing with that. Since screened fill and loam cost more I was the screener too which meant I had to bend over frequently to pick out rocks and sticks as I moved and spread the piles.
After doing all of that work, I helped seed, water, and then mow the new patch of lawn in our yard. You cannot imagine the feelings I had when someone would come over to visit and my dad would ask them how they liked "his" yard...