Old Times Outdoors . . .

Think back to your childhood. I was thinking back to all of the outdoor things we did as children. Most of our life was spent outside. When we would wake up in the morning, we threw on our clothes and ran, literally ran, to the door and threw open the screen door and ran outside to play.

We would maybe stop and play with the dogs, climb some trees, head to the sand pile, go exploring in the woods or play P – I – G on the basketball hoop on the barn. Or maybe we would mess with the animals on the farm or play around in the barn and go on made up adventures. Sometimes we would play around in the creek which we always for some reason called the crick.

Living in the country, neighbor children (actually there were no close neighbors, we all had to ride our bikes to others homes) would stop by and join in playing. You just never knew what the day would bring and this was very exciting. Much more fun, I believe, than the children have today.

We had 10 acres of ground and tons of places to play. We had a sledding hill and a pond that Mom and Dad had made for us. We had wooden floors in the barn since Mom and Dad had square dances. We could skate and skate board in there. We played lots of games in there. Even had parties. Randomly at nights we would set up our tent and all of the siblings would sleep in it, or just one or two. What great times we had.

We would play tag, kick the can, New Orleans, Who wants a corner, hide and seek, just so many games. Kick the can reminded me of the times when we would step on pop cans so that they were stuck to our feet and we would walk around on them liking the noises it made.

The house was a good distance from the barn, so we could play flies and grounders, kickball and a small version of football. We would have races from time to time. The races is why I started writing this. Haha. I know that it happened to my brother and sister as well as myself, but I wonder if any of you have had this happen and would remember it.

We were outside playing around and had to run inside to get a drink. We usually had kool-aid or iced tea. No sodas for us back then. We loved both drinks, kool-aid and tea. Of course, there was not time to mess around, we had to get our drinks and get right back at it. That meant we chugged the drink and ran right back out. As we were running, I noticed that I could hear and feel my drink sloshing around in my stomach. I called my brother over immediately and had him listen. He tried to make his do that. His would not do it so he ran in and chugged some more. He finally got his to do it and we thought it was the neatest thing. Mine stopped doing it so we ran in to get some more to drink. At this point, our sister caught us and wondered what we were up to. Of course, her being older and smarter, she knew this was not possible. She had to get a drink and run out and try it too. Sure enough, we could all jostle our stomachs and make swishing noises. We thought it was the greatest thing ever. Did any of you ever notice this?

Funny how much entertainment we had with little or nothing. I sure miss those days. I could go on and on about the things we would do outside!