Let's Take A Trip...

I was taking a trip down memory late yesterday... Summer always reminds me of my childhood. It was a time of waking up early (where have those days gone?), getting out of the house and not coming back until the street lights came on, or your mother hollered for you. It was amazing how much freedom I remember having...but, at the same time you didn't hear much about crime in rural neighborhoods. One thing I remember was that there were 3 houses where we played sports. Each house had a particular sport that was played in the yard. My house was for base/softball. The neighbor to the right was for football. There was some open space before you made it to the next house and that's where we played soccer, and the third house was where we played kickball. Kickball can be attributed to a left arm fracture one summer...bathing was rough for 6 weeks.

Another thing I remember fondly were the bugs. Many hours were spent catching fireflies and putting them in a jar, or if you were a boy...smashing their little butts on the deck to see the glow. Then there were the June Bugs. As the summers have gone by I see less and less of them. June bugs were neat because in the mornings you could look out into the yard and just above the grass line you would see tons of them just hovering around. They were kinda loud also. The thing to do with June bugs...if you were me or my friends...was to take a string, tie a loop in it and slip it on one of the legs and pull it tighter. Then, what you have is a June bug on a string flying around in circles. I couldn't tell you now what the joy was in this besides torturing a few bugs and seeing this thing fly in circles. It was pretty mean now that I think about it.

The last thing about summer I remember was playing in the hose. In those days we were easily amused. Your average garden hose and about 3-4 kids provided hours of fun. Why? Because back then we had imagination and boredom didn't come that easy. Each kid would take a turn spraying the others and if we got tired we would just go find the sprinkler. It was just that simple.