How many of you are old enough to remember these?
I got to the thinking about this today. As an adult, I’m so busy it seems like I’m on this thing a lot of the time and can’t get off just to take a breather. That makes me wish for the childhood days and recess when we could play and forget all of our cares.
Of course, we had these things on our playground in
elementary school as well as the monkey bars and swings. Back then, people weren’t so worried about
their kids falling off and breaking arms and legs or cracking their heads
open. However, today there are so many
regulations in place for every stage of life and playground equipment is no
exception.
Today these open merry-go-rounds are possibly a hazard, so
how did we manage it “way back when” and live to tell about it.
We had all sorts of destructive entertainment at home too,
when I was a kid, and amazingly, we all grew to adulthood without too much wear
and tear.
To give you a brief synopsis, we played on rusty wrecked cars
parked in the weeds to the side of the house.
I’m sure we scratched ourselves many times on those as we crawled across
the trunk, top and hood, pretending they were a divided highway and we were the
cars going down the road. I think about
this and wonder if we had highly imaginative minds or were a bit crazy.
We had chinaberry fights
all the time and were always climbing trees to gather ammo while dodging the
berries fired at us.
We always came home with
lots of welts. We swung high on tire
swings tied to a cottonwood tree near the cow fence. I think we all got scratched more than once
on the barbwire.
We would play darts in the
hallway and it’s a wonder no one’s eye was ever put out by sticking your head
out there at the wrong time.
We even fell in cow poop
occasionally playing baseball in the pasture.
The only disaster I can
recall is when we were playing Tarzan, swinging from the chinaberry trees and
my sister, Bonni, fell and cracked her head open when it was her turn. She’s the only one that ever had to go to the
hospital for an accident. I think that’s
amazing, considering there were seven of us into something all the time.
Part of this is a re-blog from 2012
