Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - A Childhood Memory

To keep things moving along - I thought it'd be interesting to participate in some of the online 'challenges.' So for today Randy Seaver says in his blog, Genea-Musings, "We all have childhood memories, but if you're like me, you're concentrating on getting the family history of your parents and earlier generations. Let's think about ourselves here."

1. What is one of your most vivid childhood memories? Was it family, friends, places, events, or just plain fun?

For me, there's not one specific memory, as much as mixtures of memories. But almost all of them revolve around playing with my sister, and playing outside - on Meadows Street, Cherry Tree Drive, and at my Grandmothers farm.

On Meadows Street I loved climbing a big old pine tree in the back yard. It had wonderful low branches, and lots of pine straw underneath for the inevitable falls. One of the most memorable climbs was when a neighborhood boy joined me in climbing, and fell, probably 10 or more feet down, but immediately got up and went crying home. Playing football in the front yard was also a frequent pastime; using two parallel sidewalks as the goals (it wasn't a particularly large football field, but we weren't particularly big kids). And yes, I was a bit of a tomboy. We also had various inflatable pools for the hot North Carolina summers. Our father would inflate it, and set it up so we could put the end of the slide in it. It only took a couple of seared legs to remember to splash water onto the slide before making the descent.

On Cherry Tree Drive, we played a lot of 'cops and robbers' and 'cowboys and Indians' using leaves from the corner bushes as ammunition. As we got older, we utilized the neighbors basketball goal for frequent games of H-O-R-S-E.

And at my Grandmother's house, we got filthy running around barefooted in the summer months chasing each other, playing house (outdoors), making and serving mud-pies, and walking along the railroad tracks that ran in front of her house, pretending to be gymnasts.

Those were some good days... thanks for the challenge.