Childhood Days Gone By

As I was weeding the garden over the weekend my children played in the yard. David was helping weed the way a toddler does. Eating weeds and grabbing bugs. Taking out all the rocks out of the rock garden and smelling the grass. Rubbing his popsicle on my arm and grinning. Faith was in her usual spot under the shade of the neighboring pine tree with a shovel. Digging for buried treasure of long forgotten pirates. Or fossils to show in a museum. Isaac was at the swing set. Climbing to the top and swinging down. Headed to rescues and daring adventures worthy of any five year old boy’s imagination. Angel sat in the shade with a book and an apple. She would read, then close her eys and I could see her imagination tracking her through space and time to the places she was discovering in her book. The wind set the wind chimes dancing and ruffled our hair. We were all together in the same place, but we were no where near each other. I closed my eyes and only listened to the sounds of their play. Angel crunching on her juicy apple and slowly turning pages, Faith’s digging and muttering whispers about what she would find, Isaac’s yells and humming his own theme music, and David’s laughter as a potato bug ticked his toes. Feeling the sun and wind on my face I turned towards the sun, soaking up the rays. For that moment I was not a mother working to keep the house in order. The worries of my life fell away as I let the sounds of childhood play take me somewhere magical, somewhere wonderful. I was transported back to my own childhood.

I was each of those children in turn. I discovered as David did the joys of experiencing nature with all my senses. I swung to the rescue as much as I was in need of rescue. I climbed to the tops of trees, the garage roof, and a hunting stand we were sure was put there magically for us to play in. My brothers and I dug for buried treasure after finding some really old (from at least the 70′s!!) coins in the garden. We were convinced we could find a dinosaur skeleton in the woods, or at the very least some fossils or gemstones. And the sandbox was our master project one summer as we pushed aside the plastic separating the sand from dirt under it and started to dig to China. We just knew we could make it. We took buckets full of dirt and hid them at the base of the bush in my uncle’s yard. Totally convinced that no one knew our secret plans we toiled all day in the sun, stopping only to get a drink from the hose at the back of the house. We had a look out, a neighbor or cousin, that would tell us if a parent was coming and we would push the plastic back over the hole and cover it with sand, trying our best despite being hot and sweaty to look bored. And when my mom was hanging laundry or working in the backyard we had to all sit on one side of the sandbox so no one would fall in the hole. Later my mom told me she knew all about it- we forgot to post a look out that could see her face in the bathroom window- and let us go because we were in the backyard and too busy to get into trouble as we usually did.
We could build tree houses out of six rusty nails, two pieces of wood and a broken hammer. We dug around the woods to find treasures. Mostly we found vases and glass bottles that we filled with water from the creek. We lived in a coal mining town, so the amber colored water looked great in the sunlight that filtered down through the canopy of tree leaves. Having been drilled not to drink the foul smelling sulfur water by every adult in the neighborhood, we could play in it, but warnings of parents are nothing compared to the inevitable double dog dare to try a sip. Everyone of us was initiated into that club at one time or another. It is something you only do once. We drug a broken shelf that someone was tossing out into our forest sanctuary and set up our bottles of potions and magic rocks (coal). We built, created, imagined, and played the long lazy summer days away. Making the grapes from our grape vine into wine in our swimming pool. Chasing what we though HAD to be a ninja all over town. Riding our bikes over homemade jumps. Running barefoot through the flowers. Any time we abandoned a project it was not seen as a failure. We moved on to bigger and better things. 

Later I would spend my summer as Angel does- I climbed a neighbor’s crab apple tree and munched away as I read stories about all the places I could travel or dream about. Elaborate games of hide and seek and kick the can with pacts and allegiances that were quickly made and quickly broken. Bloodline meant nothing if cookies or ice cream were at stake! We would ride our bike to putt putt and play as often as we could scrape together enough change. To raise money we sold lemonade. Or kool aid. We had an ice cream truck and a doughnut truck that would come through town, and a penny candy store only a short bike ride away, so we needed a lot of money for the summer. We would gather a pitcher and some cups, fill it with borrowed lemonade and sell it for up to $5 a glass. There were a lot of us to pay for and at those rates we could all go to putt putt and the penny candy store on only one pitcher of lemonade. Our only customers were our parents and grandparents.
I smiled as I remembered the sweet summer days that are tinted with a golden glow now in my adulthood. Days with no cares, no real responsibilities pressing down, from a time when life was simple because I knew there were people to take care of it for me. Magic awaited to be discovered and anything was possible. Suddenly Angel plopped down beside me to share something funny from her book. Faith called out for me to check if she really found fossilized dinosaur poop. Isaac needed pushed up high. David was trying to lick the popsicle off my arm. I was jolted back to the present, but the golden glow still remained. And I hope it does forever, because as I take the time to never forget how that felt, and as I see it happening for my own children, I can dig for fossils in the yard and send my superhero down a zip line to the rescue. I can take a walk in the woods to find treasure or take the time to lay on my belly and discover bugs again with my toddler. I can feel the magic in the air at twilight as the lightening bugs fill the yard and the bats fly over head. I can hear the faint echoes of my own childhood ringing in the laughter of my own children.