Summer was forever when I was a kid. Parents didn’t hover over us. In fact they rarely saw us. Each morning we played the same game with our mother. If we were fast enough, all she would hear was the slam of the screen door, and we were gone, hair uncombed, teeth unbrushed, and stomachs with no breakfast. We were ecstatic. On the days that Mom met us at the door, it took us an additional ½ hour to get outside. But we were combed and brushed and full of whatever some magazine told Mom was the most nutritional breakfast of the week.
When the torture was finally over, we raced out, slamming the screen door, just as Mom was telling us not to slam the screen door, and we looked next door to see if the kids who lived there waited for us. Apparently they had been tortured also and they were later than we were. All together we were six – Tom, Debbie, Chrissie, Me, Jennifer and Barbara. Sometimes we stayed together, sometimes we split up. Usually Tom, Debbie, and Chrissie stayed together because they had taken up smoking that year and thought they were big shots.
They also thought that no one knew – they were so stupid. But they were going to be teenagers soon and even though they smelled like tobacco and could pass for chimneys, they flatly denied that they were smoking.
Since there were six of us, at least one of us had a dime. So before we split up we would make a trip to the penny candy store down at the end of the street. A lot of things were sold at that store but we couldn’t name even one of them because all we saw was the beautiful glass front case to the one side of the store. In that case was everything we could ever want in this world – penny candy – shelves of penny candy. You could buy ten things with one dime so each of us was assured one thing and the owner of the dime got three.
Jennifer, Barbara and I were younger and were fine without the three chimneys. We flip-flopped our way through the woods behind our houses and went further every day. We were intrepid explorers. If we came across a stream, we somehow managed to get every part of ourselves wet. We found interesting branches and rocks. We all had pocket knives and we tried to make eating sticks out of birch. When you’re a kid in the country, you have a pocket knife.
We knew where all the berries were and when they would ripen – blackberries and raspberries and blueberries. We never took any home. We just stood at the bushes and ate until our mouths were the color of the berries and so were our clothes because we had wiped our hands there so much.
We found some of the most beautiful flowers growing wild in the woods and if we came upon a large mossy area, we had to lay down on it. Some of the most secret of secrets were confided while lying on the softest bed that only we knew existed.
My favorite flower was and is still the violet. They grew all over the place. But you had to be an experienced land rover to know where to find the best ones. The very best ones were across the street, behind a house and down a steep embankment. In my magical years of wandering that was the only place that I ever found white violets. I’m not sure if I loved white violets because they were beautiful or because they were hard to find.
An old couple lived two houses down from the violets house. There was a front porch and a big window so that if you were on the front porch you could talk to anyone who was in the window. I have no idea when I started to say “hi” to Charles, the man in the window. Someone might have told me to do it or I just picked it up from other kids. The problem was, we never could see in the window.
So we never saw Charles. If we weren’t in a hurry, we’d park our bikes and walk up on the porch and sit and talk to Charles. He had very little to talk about so we would sit back, put our feet up on the porch banister and talk about our days out in a world that Charles would never know. He would ask questions.
We would get bored and off we would go on our bikes. Every child who passed that house shouted hello to Charles and we all got a happy hello back. But, none of us ever saw Charles. Charles passed away one winter day and his parents moved so that when summer came, there was a new family in Charles’ house. I don’t think I felt bad. I just had to learn not to shout “Hi Charles,” as I whizzed past his house on my bike.
There was only one drawback to living in the country and it was a big one. We used to appoint a lookout and the others of us would dam up a part of the stream we had stumbled upon the day before. Out of the sack we brought with us came little boats, shovels, jars and anything we thought we might use in the lake we were creating. We were all playing and having a wonderful time and the lookout had long ago forgotten to look out. Most of the time it didn’t matter.
But, every once in awhile a garter snake that to us was the size of a python slithered across our path. It took the play all out of us. We couldn’t get our toys picked up fast enough. We were sure there were more of these giant, garter, python, snakes on the attack. We spent the rest of the afternoon trying to find the three chimneys hoping they would teach us how to smoke.
If we were off learning to smoke like we should have been, we wouldn’t have been attacked by the killer snakes.
We never did learn to smoke. We managed to stay reasonably healthy so we could have our own children who could elude us and have forever days in the woods. Among the three of us there are ten children.
But there aren’t any more woods. There aren’t any forever days for our children, no time for them to be free of us, to have their own secrets, to explore and to know where the good berries are and the flowers and the streams.
I know all of this is gone because when I go home none of it is there anymore. It started when city people moved to the country and brought the city with them. They didn’t want to be inconvenienced with long trips to the grocery store so a grocery store opened and on and on. And then more affluent people came to the country and bought land and taxes went up and country folk went down the drain.
Some of the woods I used to love was purchased and made into a miniature golf course. When that tanked, the course was left, the owners fled and to this day the land is empty and ruined. All that is left is some wood and pieces of green felt.
But maybe that’s ok because even if the woods were still there, we would have to be crazy to let our children go out and play in them unsupervised for even ten minutes. We will be ringing in 2012 in a few weeks. How far we’ve come.
