I just saw a picture on facebook, and this is what it said:
"My curfew was the streetlights, and my mom didn't call my cell phone, she yelled 'Time to come in!' I played outside with my friends, not online. If I didn't eat what my mom made, I didn't eat. Handsanitizer didn't exist, but you
could get your mouth washed out with soap. I rode a bike without a helmet, and getting dirty was okay.
I drank water out of the garden hose and survived."
This just made me super nostalgic. I had the best childhood. Let me just reminisce for a short while.
My brother, my two neighbors, Jordan and Jalin, and I used to hang out all the time. Back then, Pokemon cards were the coolest things a could have, and we would spend hours trading them and pretending that we knew how to "really play" with them. We built these incredible forts out of chairs, stools, and blankets. They were so awesome -- you could climb up on to multiple stories of these forts. The tallest one we ever made was 3 stories tall. How freakin' awesome is that? Extremely dangerous probably, but we didn't even care. My neighbors had a big inflateable pool that was about 4 feet deep, and we used to spend hours in that thing. Looking back, it's kind of gross, but whatever. We had sleepovers, and watched movies like Beetle Juice and Jack Frost, but even back then I couldn't stay awake through an entire movie, so to this day I don't know how Beetle Juice ends. Our backyard was bordered by big bushes and trees, and we would go on major adventures through the "woods" and act like we were hunters in the jungle. Our downstairs back patio was just big enough to play roller hockey, but we split playing time equally on the patio and their driveway, which was flatter than ours. Me and my brother used left-handed sticks, and Jordan and Jalin used right-handed. Lefty kids are better, no doubt :) Jordan and I used to hang out with her older sister, Amber, and listen to Brittney Spears and Destiny's child and all of those super talented people. Amber thought she was a really great dancer (compared to me, I suppose she was), so she always taught us really weird dances and told us the "right way" to kiss and talk to boys. My dad had a huge stereo system in the lower level of our house in the TV room, and whenever there was an Avs or a Bruins game on, he would wear his hockey jerseys and blast music from the speakers so loudly that we could hear it from just about anywhere on our end of the cul-de-sac. There was a little section between our front yards that Ron (their dad) had built to be a little shared garden for our families. It wasn't super big, but it was big enough. We had a giant, and I mean giant, pine tree in our front yard, and it was the best place to hide during hide-and-go-seek because you could climb up to the perfect spot or hide in the branches where it was almost impossible to be seen. When I first learned how to ride my bike, I practiced in the backyard. I would ride down the hill, go all the way around the swing set, and ride back up to the top of the hill. I did this so many times, and was so used to it, that I thought I should try it on the driveway -- on my very first time down, I ran right into the mail box and cut open my right arm and leg. Another awesome bike accident happened when I was trying to impress Jalin's friend Hayden. I was riding my bike barefoot and with my eyes closed. I took a sharp turn accidently, right in the middle of our cul-de-sac, and face planted. I got the worst boody nose, had rocks up my nose for a few days, and my front tooth fell out about a week later (after turning blue). We had a can crusher in our garage, and I would try to finish my soda (a rare treat) as fast as possible so that I could crush it. We used to think that the house on the end of the street was haunted, and made up all sorts of stories about how we saw ghosts and how people had died inside. When Jordan and I got in fights, we would ride our bikes around the street for hours, singing songs to each other about how much the other had hurt our feelings. Our favorite thing was when huge flocks of geese flew over our houses when we were outside -- I can still remember a few times when there were so many geese that you couldn't even see the sky. For some reason, that was just the coolest thing. Story Time: Amber had a pet guinea pig (I forget it's name), and they loved to bring it outside to let it run around. One day they were letting it run from between one person's legs, across the yard, to another person. They let me try, and I was sitting right in front of a huge bush. For some reason, when it was running at me, I got really scared, so I rolled out of the way, and the guinea pig ran right into the bush. We looked for that thing for so long, for days, and it was all my fault that it was even in there in the first place. Eventually, they gave up the search, and I felt so horrible knowing that I was the reason the guinea pig was certainly dead in that bush. But, alas! A few months, MONTHS, later, they found the guinea pig, and it was alive. Is that crazy or what? Every year at Halloween, my dad wore this huge scary old man mask (it still creeps me out), and one year a little girl got so scared that she literally peed on our front porch. It was awesome. I begged my mom to paint my room baby blue, and she finally let me. I hung these really awesome lights up around my room and was convinced that my room was what made me cool. I had about a thousand beenie babies, and would spend hours on end playing with them. Sometimes, I made them fight each other in giant beenie baby wars. I used to be terrified of spiders, and whenever I left my basement, I ran up the stairs because I thought that a giant daddy long leg was chasing me. When my brother was about 6 years old, he put a blanket on the light fixture in his room because "he was cold and wanted to warm up his blanket." It caught fire and almost burned our whole house down. I used to sleep in my brother's room because he had a bunk bed, so in the summers sometimes we'd have sleepovers. I was sleeping on the top bunk once and threw up over the side, right onto my brother, who was sleeping soundly below. Once during the summer, we had two foxes try to make a nest in our backyard. I loved seeing them from the kitchen window, but I was secretly afraid of them. When I was about 6 years old, maybe 5, we had a huge family reunion party in our backyard. There were more than 50 people there, and though I don't remember everything about it, I remember it as one of the greatest days of my life. During one of the big snow storms that tend to happen during Colorado winters, a bunch of snow collected on one part of the roof, and when it finally fell off, it shook the ground. Side note: after it snowed, I thought my backyard was the most beautiful place on earth. I called it my own Winter Wonderland. My brother and I had an awesome Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets video game, and we would take turns eating lunch and trying to beat each level. We had a Black Widow's nest in our upstairs porch once. I used to tell people that we found out about the nest one day when my mom saw a Black Widow crawling up my leg...that was a lie. Another Story Time: One time, I caught a grasshopper, and made it my pet. I honestly thought of it as my friend, but most importantly it was my pet. I would break up Pringles into tiny little pieces, and hold the grasshopper in my fingers and feed it the Pringles and pieces of grass. His home was a box with holes in the lid and lots of grass on the bottom. I truly loved him, though I don't remember what I named him. The day he died was a very sad day for me, and I remember blaming the cloudy day on the fact that my best friend had just died. There was a pumpkin patch hidden in the backyard, but we only grew pumpkins in it a few times. There was also a little garden next to the brick staircase that we used to grow raspberries and strawberries. Homegrown is always better.
I feel better now that I got to share all of that. Reminiscing is one of my favorite things to do; I feel like it's healthy to think about your past sometimes. Good and bad times. It's one of my goals in life to write a memoir for my family. I might as well start now.
