Tuesday, May 02, 2006

A Home Memory

Reading Barbara's blog got me to thinking about our hoe on Freeport. It was a child's paradise. My special memories of our home and street:

1. playing hide-and-go-seek with most of the kids on the street. I loved to hide in the woods. 2. building tree forts.
3. hiding from the man in the caboose! We thought he reported children to the police.
4. sneaking across the tracks to eat strawberries (I think I only did this a couple of times) or into the orchard to eat apples (the farmer really loved us for this!)
5. playing house in the woods - I made a livingroom, diningroom, kitchen, bedroom and bathroom inbetween the trees. The leaves made great toilet paper! (how rude...)
6. riding the bicycle on the paths through the woods and pretending I was traveling on a real road.
7. eating rubbarb dipped in sugar, fresh from the Chandler's garden.
8. the GoGo girl cutouts on our bedroom wall. We thought they were so cool.
9. playing hide and seek in the basement and the favourite hiding spot was the speaker.
10. our first sleepover was in the basement.
11. Mr. Cakoe (?) and his friendly words. He had a favourite song, too! I think it was about Joanne in a bikini (?). She wore an itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny yelow polka dot bikini.
12. I think it was Mr. Cakoe's son who had a convertable and he gave the kids a ride around the block.
13. Riding double after being told not to and we fell. Cathy Jane needed to get stitches.
14. Stephen taking my brand new bicycle and having an accident with it. I was more concerned about my new bike that I hadn't even ridden yet rather than Stephen who banged his head - such sibling love!
15. Seeing baby birds in the tree outside our bedroom window.
16. yelling to the kids in the house attached to us through the bathroom wall.
17. mom hanging the laundry on the line
18. Mrs. Chandler feeding the squirrels and chipmunks. She would call them and they would come down out of the trees to eat from her hand.

3 comments:

Evie said...

I guess Cooksville was somewhat more rural than the town where I grew up. I remember riding my bike everywhere, but no one in my neighborhood fed squirrels and fruit was only seen in the grocery store down the street. Are you telling me fruit doesn't grow in cellophane packages?!

Barbara said...

a lot of this I don't remember, but reading this made me smile. Life was so simple back then! Gone are the days when you just send your little ones out of the house to play knowing they will be safe ... just seeing them at lunch and dinner time.

Joanne said...

It's funny the things you "forget", then with one reminder, a flood of memories come back. I remember all of this. I can hear Mr. Cakoe singing his "Itsy, bitsy, teeny weeny Bikini" song (my bikini had orange polka dots with frills) to us as we walked the dog with him, the dog he had to keep muzzled because he was afraid the dog would nip at us. I also remeber the ride in the covertible, and the bag of some grassy type substance that had a sweet pungent smell to it that I found on the floor. Hmmmm, I wonder what that was.