by Elizabeth Mcgill

Created on: December 02, 2008   Last Updated: December 07, 2008

When I was a kid, we got a stocking filled with one orange, an apple some peppermint, and a pair of socks. Our big-ticket item was a bike, or a big wheel. We were happy with what we got. My childhood memoirs call me back to the carefree days only a young kid growing up in the before the 80's era can have.

As kids, we played marbles, jacks, cards, and jump rope. We never got tired of having corncob fights, and tearing up the front yard with tag football games. We stood, breathing hard, holding sweaty hands, playing Red Rover. When it rained, we stayed on the carport and played Mother May I, and Green Light Red Light, and Simon Says.

On hot endless summer days, we played Tag, King of the Hill, and Hide and Seek. We would use the edge of a rock to draw a hopscotch pattern on the front porch. I remember sitting on the old steps and playing, Guess which hand it is in? The grass hardly had a chance to grow in the back yard, as we were always making dirt roads and hills to drive our matchbox cars on.

We played Dodge Ball, Ring around the Roses, Pirates, and the old Hot Potato game. We had the most fun from coffee cans, looping two strings through them and stood on them at a starting line, racing each other across the yard. We "fished" with cane poles off the side of the porch, using some string and rocks as our line and sinker. Our pool? The creek, where we would catch crawdads, and paint our faces with different colored clays, before whooping and hollering through the woods in an intense game of Cowboys and Indians.

We would fly down the hill in a red wagon that to us of course, was a race car. We built tree forts, and played war games, using pine cones as our ammunition. We did not have to wait for school to learn what a salamander was, or learn about lizards, butterflies, dragonflies, crickets, and grasshoppers. At night, we would check for ticks, and dab alcohol on our bug bites, and camphor on our chigger bites. All dotted pink with calamine lotion, we would crawl into bed, tuckered out from a hard day of play.

The thing is, we had the whole bounty of Mother Nature to explore and use. Our imaginations were our passports to foreign countries and mystical islands. My childhood memoirs live on now, in a world that frowns on the Peter Pan syndrome.

I know soon, I will have a chance to relate my childhood memoirs to my little grandson. You better believe, he will get a red wagon, and some matchbox cars. Maybe one day he will also have great childhood memoirs like mine, to relate back to his own grandchildren, and carry on the tradition of making childhood something special again.

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