Ahh, the simpler days of my youth. The simple joys of playing outside, simple toys and feeling safe playing outside even after dark. Now, I am a techie to the max. I love technology! I love my Iphone and I love my computer. I love Facebook. I love playing games on the net. I love the easiness of typing lesson plans and saving them on a flashdrive for future years. I love being able to print out a worksheet needed in the classroom from my computer at a moments notice.
But that being said - - those of you who are my age, or maybe even 20 years younger - - do you sometimes miss those simpler times? I look back at my childhood and never get the sense of hurry, hurry, hurry like our life seems now. I know that our toys didn't cost much, because we didn't have that much money growing up. We were comfortable but that was because both of my parents grew up in the depression and knew how to make every penny scream all the way to the bank. There was always a huge garden that was canned or frozen for the winter. My mom made all of our clothes, including my dad's. Shopping was once a year at Christmas or out of a catalog and that was very seldom because we didn't have the money.
(Update, Oct. 22, 2018. My dad was a teacher, mom stayed at home. If you are a teacher, you will instantly get what I'm talking about - making money scream all the way to the bank.!)
So I think back to the things that made me happy in my childhood - aka my toys or playthings. They certainly weren't electronic games or shopping sprees or Disney vacations. They were simple but they made me very happy and content.
The very first thing that comes to mind is our wonderful treehouse. Now by today's standards, this tree house would be condemmed - but we loved it. My brother built it for us. Then he decided it should be a two story house, so he added a second story. (The Wichita paper came down and did a front page article on our double story tree house.)We played and played in that house every day for years until it was too unsafe, and the big tree it was in had to come down. Also from that big old tree we had a swing - a gunny sack stuffed with something (don't know what). We would straddle it and swing our hearts out! There was always sand someplace - which led to hours of making sand creations. When a lady got married in our church, we were so enthralled with the whole wedding idea, that we made her a sand cake and decorated it with flowers from mom's garden.
In the summer, we ran through the sprinkler to stay cool. I don't remember having a wading pool at all.
Dad made us a swing set in his shop, that lasted probably 30 or more years. Even my kids got to play on it before the swing set came down. I had a bicycle with those big fat tires that I rode nearly every day in the summer. Either I'd ride around our tiny town, or I'd ride out to the creek.
My brother took me fishing with him on our bikes out in the country, along a country creek. Thanks Gene for taking your tag along sister with you. He was the one who told me that if I wanted to go fishing with him, I had to bait my own hook. I did! He did take the fish off, because most of them were catfish and he didn't want me to get finned and bleed all over!
When we had a nickel or so, we got to go to the drugstore a block away, and pick out candy. I remember choosing a charms lollypop many times, because when you unwrapped them, you sometimes found a free coupon for another one. I loved those lollypops.
We did not have a Sonic to run to for a soda. In fact, soda was a treat we got very rarely. My mom made homemade rootbeer one summer because she loved rootbeer. It was really good from what I remember - and I think only a couple of the jars exploded in the basement.
My favorite thing to do was to skate. I had those old skates that clamped on your shoes, and you had to tighten them so your shoe wouldn't pop out and you'd take a header on the concrete! There was a church catty corner from our house that had lots of sidewalks, so I'd go over there and skate around and around and around. I imagine my mom cringed everytime I put the skates on, because they were not kind to kids' shoes! Shoes were expensive so we took very good care of them. She never said a word to us about skating although our shoes would have black marks on them from the clamps!
Dad built a full size pingpong table and put it in the basement. We kids spent hours down there playing pingpong. My brother was a demon pingpong player. He always beat me, but in doing so, I became a much better player. Dad also made us a fooze ball table, and we played that for hours using a pingpong ball. I must admit, sometimes that poor pingpong ball got squished in the fooze ball game! He made a toss game using the rubber rings from canning jars mom used. And he made a karam board that my brother played a lot. I never was very good at it, because it required flipping these plastic pieces with your thumb and finger and my fingers were too tender!
There were lots of picinics to a nearby state lake where we ate and swam using innner tubes to float. Our church had lots of picnics in the country at one of the member's farms. We had huge bonfires, and us kids would climb the cliffs, or wade in the teeny tiny creek for a mile or so.
Of course, football games were a biggie growing up. Every Friday night was a football night where I marched in the band. The rest of the Friday nights were basketball where again I played with the band. I suppose that is not much different than kids do today.
On July 4th, we would walk to the edge of town to buy fireworks - mostly snakes and firecrackers. My brother built this intricate fort out of clay, and then we blew it up with firecrackers. Aaah, the memories!
My sister was 5 years younger than me, and had straight hair like I did. She wanted curly hair, but perms were unheard of then, unless you did them yourself. So I saved orange juice cans and toilet paper tubes and put her hair up in them to make it curl. It worked - for about an hour and then her hair was straight again. Simple things, simple times. Far different than going to a salon today and paying $90 for a perm.
We had some of those simple things for our own kids. The big refridgerator boxes became playhouses that they would decorate. When our old water bed mattress needed to be replaced, we took it outside, filled it up and let the kids jump on it until it burst! They rode bicycles down our hill, and our son would always try to ramp it across the creek. Hmm - never made it many times, so would come back up muddy and sopping wet. They had a rope swing that supposedly they were using to swing across the creek (tiny creek - 12 feet across, 6 - 12 inches of water). They always "missed" the other side and landed in the creek. Here they would come up, muddy and sopping wet. When we had a downpour, the creek would widen to 150 feet across and the current would be super fast. It would be 2 - 4 feet deep in places. When the water went down enough to be safe, our kids would lay a huge piece of styrofoam and float to the edge of our property. Dad would haul them out of the current, and they'd run back and do it all over again. We hauled that huge piece of styrofoam home from the lake where we found it on a camping trip.
Simple times, and simple things. Life in the slow lane. Good night!
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