Jan 16, 2011

What did your family do for fun when you were a child?

Several things that are quite unlike anything done today. We had an old B&W TV which didn't hold our attention very long so we played games. We also went swimming in the canal just about every day in the summer afternoons. We also played around on the hillside above the house, went rabbit hunting in the hills around the house and climbed trees.

The games we played I mentioned the other night. Those games are called night games now as played in your childhood. No Bears are out tonight, Kick the Can, Hide and Seek, and Flags were the most popular ones.

Swimming in the canal above the house was always fun. It was only 2 feet deep and thus really didn't lend to swimming but it was wet and fun. We would often walk up the lane to the weir (where the water was taken out for our ditches) or to where the bridge was that we crossed coming to the house about a half mile away. We would then put inner tubes into the canal and sit on them and float back to the house. We would sometimes paddle to go a little faster since it was a pretty slow running stream. We would have water fights in the canal also and loved to find the pockets of sand where it was easy to walk. Sometimes we would just float on our backs down the canal without tubes.

There was a small bridge that crossed the canal by where we swam and it went up onto the hillside. There were numerous trails that went along through the trees and lot of rocks and scorpions. We would sometimes go hunting the scorpions and tickle their heads with long pieces of grass until they would strike themselves, not very nice but we did it since we didn't really like them. There were also a lot of black tail jack rabbits that dad would let us hunt with .22 rifles so that we could control their numbers. They would eat the hay in the filed and destroy a lot of our feed if let get out of hand. I can also remember chasing a badger up there one time trying to kill it. When I was in high school I would run up the hill and across the bench training for cross country and half mile races. I use to run after the deer but of course never ever catch up to them.

There were a lot of trees around the farm also that we would climb and play in as well. There really was no lack of things to do once the work got done.