Having a push toy stolen because it looked identical to one that was lost by a neighbor kiddie. Picking little red holly berries by the truckload, putting them in a bucket, and throwing them at the neighbor kid who stole my toy.
Hey, I live in Cali.
POST OF THE WEEK HERE, Sir ENAUD.
LOVED this!
Hey, I live in Cali.
Me and most of the boys in my neighborhood were poor, we spent a lot of time fishing in the local rivers and ponds, we caught a lot of trout, bass, and horned pout, also pickerel and perch. In the summertime when it rained at night, we would go out with flashlights and catch night crawlers, large worms that came out of the ground to mate when the dirt was saturated. We would keep them in the cellar in a big galvanized tub with moss in it, and use them for bait. Our parents didn't worry if we were gone for half a day or more, they knew we were watching out for each other, and we'd come home with a big creel full of fish, clean them, and that would be dinner either that day or the next. It was a very small town, and everybody was known to each other. I go back there now and the place feels alien.
Sometimes a few of us daredevils would climb to the very top of some large pine trees, and look out over the town, just hanging out way up in the treetops. The scary part was climbing down. We swam in the river when the water was high, jumping off of the 30 foot high granite cliffs into the current, the older boys taunting those that hesitated.
When me and my brothers would stay up the hill at our grandparents house, we had the orchards to play in, they were owned by the family across the way from pépère's house, but the old man didn't mind us kids being there as long as we behaved. There were wild concord grapevines that produced a ton of fruit every year and we would eat those and green apples till we got stomach aches. We would feed the dairy cows the tall grass that they just couldn't reach through the barbed wire, and apples, we'd give them apples. The farmer didn't like that, he said it makes them drunk
Pépère and I were quite close, we would walk in the woods for hours and just be there, seeing the wildlife, picking wintergreen berries, and talking...
In my teens I felt very displaced. Nothing made very much sense to me, the war, the hippies, the protests and riots on the TV. I had a paper route and did a lot of odd jobs for the elderly customers on my route. I would hang out with them afterwards and just talk. We were in the same boat at different ends of the age spectrum, we were without a place to be or a purpose it seemed to me...
My childhood was very special looking back, I wish more folks could have experienced the same type of things that I have been fortunate to have enjoyed. Now I'm feeling a little weird writing all of this down here...
POST OF THE WEEK HERE, Sir ENAUD.
LOVED this!