Mom, When You Were Little, What Did You Do For Fun?

As a young girl growing up and living five miles from town, playtime often required creativity. Who would I play with? My best friend, Judy, lived right next door (she had a Shetland pony) with her four older brothers. Other friends sometimes I met through a country church which my dad pastored, so their ages could vary a great deal. But for the most part, my on/off friendship with Judy was usually it.
What would we play? Most often our playtime involved her Barbie dolls and my Pepper dolls(Mom would not let me have anything Barbie). Roll playing brought out the best in both of us. We even met a lady in our church who made Barbie doll clothes. We were in heaven! Neither of us had a Barbie house so we built one out of cardboard boxes and painted it. Architect Digest would have been impressed.
Where would we play? Judy went to my church so I saw her pretty much 24/7. Yes, we both had other friends, most of whom we shared, because we lived in a small town and were in the same grade. But sometimes we would have other friends or cousins over, and the other friend without visitors could have been left out. But more times than not, the lonely one would be invited along, and it made everything just that much more fun! I lived on property with a great hill for sledding in the winter and just rolling down the hill sideways in the summer. At the base of the hill, in the center, was a Hickory tree, which made skiing and sledding a bit tricky! As we would sled down the snow-packed hill , our dogs, Pokey and Chips, would run along side us, barking and panting wildly! Not far from the Hickory tree was a large oak tree, that, during one summer storm, was struck by lightning, splitting the tree in half! The part that remained upright my brother, sister, and I made into a tree house (fort), and the horizontal half became the home of a "girls only" club. The hill continued to slope down until it reached a channel. Now, sometimes in winter, when the temperatures had thawed and frozen the channel, the channel would become so hard that something magical happened. Once my brother said he thought that he could make it on his sled from the top of the hill , right onto the channel ice. Guess what? He did it!
In the summer, my mom, sister, and I would walk alongside the channel where the turtles were sunning on nearby logs and the frogs were croaking their little hearts out. I remember a large area by the water where the tall grasses had been flattened down, perhaps by animals or hard rain. We girls would lie down on the grass in the summer sun and stare at the clouds, pretending they were animals or something else. Some of the shapes we came up with would make us laugh, so eventually we called that special place our "secret laughing place." I can still see it now.
Those are the kinds of stories you can't make up; some are quite ordinary, while others showed what we kids were able to create without any Game Boys or DD gadgets requiring no imagination at all.
I'm so grateful for the childhood my parents gave me! Thanks, Mom and Dad.