Child's Play

The older we get, the more we look back at our past -- seeing it almost as if written in a third person novel.  Although it's not unusual for my mind to wander, and it does very frequently, most of my wandering is reminiscing about childhood.  Little mental vignettes pass through my mind, stopping like a ViewMaster.

I remember playing games with my sisters.  I wasn't much of a board game player.  Actually, no one wanted to play with me.  I couldn't focus for any length of time to finish the game.  I'd start to fidget and distract my sisters.  I'd end a Monopoly game by making noises in the crook of my arm and make believe someone had a gas problem.  Throwing the pink, green and blue paper money around also helped speed it along.  I'd end up losing all my money first so I could go and hide in the pantry to eat sour cream and onion potato chips before dinner.  

One of my least favorite games was Operation.  I wasn't very good at it.  Because I needed to concentrate really hard to pull out the wrenched ankle, when the buzzer went off (and it invariably would), I'd be scared out of my wits and jump up pulling the little tweezer wire out of the plastic game board.  

Most games didn't survive long in my hands.  The corners of the boxes would be taped and re-taped because someone sat on them or tried to cram them onto the top shelf in the closet.  The inside box cover would be filled with my graffiti of unflattering pictures of my sister's faces and body parts.   I'd lose pieces of them or repurpose them in some of my make-believe play.  Cooties worked well as pets for my GI Joes.  I'd tie a piece of yarn around their plastic peg necks and the other to Joe's hand.  He would drag them around until they lost all their legs or a part of their thorax.  

Marbles from Chinese Checkers or Parchesi would end up rolling under beds to be lost forever among the dust bunnies. Some just disappeared like some sort of marble fairy would take them away in the night.  Many of my marbles would be chipped and scratched from being used in the yard.  I'm sure my Dad encountered many of them as bullets flying from the lawn mower.

But indoor games were really a rare occurrence -- saved for rainy days.  Most other days were spent outside.  We could spend hours sitting on our swing set.  The white, purple and rust colored poles supported two swings, a teeter totter and a glider.  The late comers would be relegated to the teeter totter.  Back and force we'd swing, higher and higher, until we made the swing set posts go thwomp.  We tried to time our swinging so that the two swings weren't moving at the same time to prevent the back of the set from lifting off the ground.  So we tried to alternate our swinging...we were very scientific.  Unfortunately, it didn't work and my dad had to add little ball and chains to each of the posts to anchor them to the ground to stop the set from tipping over. The thwomp would sound when the anchor pulled taught and the post fell back into the ground.  Too bad the oil industry couldn't harness the power of little girl swing sets to drill for the mother load.

We'd sing songs -- songs my mom taught us from her childhood and popular songs from the radio.  And we would talk about make believe things.  If we looked at the sky when we were at the swings highest point we could be birds flying off into the sunset.  If we closed our eyes, we could be captives on a pirate ship.

The swing set served as a rocking chair when we were sad, a piece of exercise equipment when we needed to burn off the second whoopee pie before we went in for dinner, and an excellent theater seat to view our neighbor's cows.  Prime swing viewing was when our gentleman farmer neighbor would cut down his hay and bail it.  The day would start with his tractor moving through the grass with a sort of large hair trimmer on the side of it.  Then would come another tractor attachment in the back with little metal finger combs to line up the stacks of grass.  Then the wondrous bailing machine.  The bailing machine made such a unique noise...a sort of a hooumph, hooumph.  It had a sort of silly dangerous sound to our young ears.  It was exciting when those green bails spit out of the end of the machine and fell to the ground.  The field would be littered with fuzzy cow food blocks and the aroma of alfalfa.

Make-believe came so easy to us.   Old tin can tops (bent in half by Daddy) were excellent whittling tools for peeling bark off of sticks and could also be used to cut up grass and other vegetation when we were cooking like Mommy.  What amazing food we could make with a little water, dirt and cut up grass.  I can almost smell the wet dirt and fresh cut greenery.

To be a child again....when distraction was encouraged.