The Good Old days

I'm feeling a little nostalgic today, sitting here with the door open. Kids are outside playing and laughing. The little girl from down the street hasn't gotten her hair combed yet. But, she is racing on her bike. Man, do you remember summer mornings? My main objective was to get outside. Get on my bike or in my skates. If there was a trophy for playing the hardest, I think I would have won. From hop scotch, to kickball, to stick ball, to football, to jax, to marbles, to kick the can, to the games we made up. Do kids still play jax and marbles? Anything that could be played outside, we played it. What about red light, green light? What was the purpose of that game? What ever it was, we had fun playing it.
At my house you couldn't go inside after my big sisters cleaned up. They were bully's. They didn't want to be bothered when the "story's" came on. It was out of the question to go inside, they might try to make me take a nap. We drank water from the hydrant anyway. You didn't go inside until they called you in for lunch. Then we ate and went right back to playing until the street lights came on. Unless it was a day when my big sister ran everyone away. Our house was the play spot. We had someone in every age group. Little kids, medium size kids, and teenagers.
We didn't have gadgets, hell we didn't even have proper equipment. I never had a bike helmet or knee pads. We played in the streets, in the woods, and in yards. I can still hear Mrs. Ethel yelling, " Ya'll get out my garden and play in this yard". They didn't worry about the grass or being sued if we hurt ourselves. They just patched us up and sent us on our way. We ate mud pies, played in the dirt and mud puddles. No one ever got a horrible infection and died. Even the asthmatics played hard. There were no know allergy's, we didn't know what gluten was. Mrs. Jenny had the best plums, Mrs. Dora had pomegranates, Mr. Luke had pears,and my grandma had figs. We didn't even have to worry about lunch on Howard Ave. Life was good from sun up to sun down. There was no insomnia. There was no restlessness. There was no boredom. The next day we couldn't wait to get up and do it again!