It's a typical summer Saturday. The sky is deep blue, there are a few wispy clouds in the sky. Lots of Cesna-type planes flying over, just like they always do on a clear day. You're in your yard, playing with the neighbor kids, when all of a sudden your mom calls you in and tells your friends you can't play anymore, they can go home now. Dad has decided to go visit Uncle George and Aunt Winnie. There was no phone call made, no texting, no communication at all. In the 60's, you just went to visit and took your chances that they would be home. They usually were.
Uncle George is Dad's brother, and when those two get together they can gab up a storm! But you don't mind going to their house, because it is a beautiful day and you can go outside and explore their back yard while the grown-ups talk. It's a win-win situation!
I used to love going to visit my nearest and dearest aunt and uncle. Looking back, they didn't live that far away from us. It seemed a lot farther when I was young. I loved the ride through the forests of western Washington, always looking to see how high the river was as we passed it. The town playground was right beside my aunt and uncle's house, so after the hello's and how-are-you's were done, my sister and I would run over to the playground. Though we didn't go to school with any of the kids there, or even live near them, we knew most of them and it was always fun to see who was playing on any given day.
The playground was well stocked with all the best equipment--rings, slides, swings of all sorts, tether ball, jungle gym, teeter totters, merry-go-round. It was hard to choose which to go on first! My favorite was the rings, and I would go across them for hours, to the point of getting blood blisters on my hands.
In the 60's girls wore dresses to school, almost without exception. If we were to have any fun at recess, we learned to wear shorts under our dresses so the naughty boys couldn't see our underwear when we were in the upper reaches of the jungle gym or hanging on the rings. That was weekdays. But on the weekends we wore pants. And we could freely enjoy any piece of playground equipment we desired! We would run from slide to swing to teeter totter and back again. We would play until we were called back to my aunt and uncle's house, either for barbecue or just to drive home. No matter how long we had been at the playground, we always wanted to be there longer. We would get home tired and worn out, but always feeling like we had had a great day. As the sun slowly went down and the birds sang their good-night songs, we would go to bed, protesting all the way, and fall asleep five minutes later.
Hi Cheryl,
ReplyDeleteThis is Tina. I remember some things very fondly about the 60's too. Spending summer days with a neighborhood kid climbing trees and collecting inchworms. I remember we probably disrupted their ecology a bit by collecting 200 of them but then we put them all back on different branches and did not stop until we had put every one of them back. I think we were both 8. I loved the bright green color and how they would inch along. How delicately perfect and tiny each one was.