by june

Created on: September 14, 2009

Hurry Home, June's Almost Dead

I grew up in a midsize town in South Georgia and looking back now, life seemed to be much simpler then than the world we live in today. There was a innocence that we don't have today. Kids played until dark when their mothers called them in and the windows were open so you could hear the crickets chirp and get a cool breeze. We didn't worry about anything much further than our own neighborhood.

My mother went to work after my father died when I was six so I learned to be independent at a pretty early age. She worked long hours and it was necessary that I look after myself a lot of the time. My older brother was supposed to keep an eye out for me but he was young too and had his own stuff. He couldn't be bothered with a little sister all the time.

By the time I was ten, I had learned to manage quite nicely. I was never a girly girl and didn't play girly girl things very often. What I really liked was to ride my bike and roller skate and climb the occasional tree. I usually talked my friends into doing what I wanted to do in exchange for playing some of the dumb girl stuff they wanted to play. I reasoned that it would be practice for when I had to grow up and do girl things all the time.

My knees and elbows were usually skinned and I had quite a few bruises but I managed to keep from getting hurt seriously considering some of my antics. There was a lumber company a few blocks from my house and it had the most amazing tree with really good thick branches that you could climb up and feel secure. We would climb up the tree and get on top of the lumber company so we could sit underneath where the branches hung over the flat roof. It was a great hiding spot and we plotted many devious things sitting up there. Eventually, the conversations would lead to boys which ended the adventures. We started to think that maybe boys wouldn't be interested in girls that climbed trees like monkeys. Nevertheless, I managed to climb up there for a couple of years and had lots of fun without getting injured unless you counted that one time that I slipped and scraped most of the skin off my knee.

Unfortunately, I wasn't quite so lucky on the ground. Roller skating is always dangerous and there weren't any helmets and knee pads back then so I tried to practice landing softly. The bike was a different story. I loved my bike and riding fast was exciting. Most of the time I could manage to stop or fall on the grass if necessary.

But one day my

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