Current Poll
| Longing for the days of my youth |
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| Opinion | |||
| Written by Jean Carder | |||
| Wednesday, 18 February 2009 08:00 | |||
What I wouldn’t give to be a kid again. No responsibilities, no worries, no decisions. As a kid, the toughest decision I had was to decide if I would spend the day reading or playing outside. My little brother and I grew up on our great-grandparents’ farm on Cedar Creek. It wasn’t really a big farmhouse. It had a living room and dining room, a kitchen big enough for a table, a bathroom and Mom’s and Dad’s bedroom downstairs. Upstairs was my bedroom, and two bedrooms for my three brothers. There was also a storage room.You know, now that I think about it, that house was way ahead of its time in design. All the bedrooms had huge walk-in closets. There was plenty of room for my clothes plus our toys in my closet. At one time, my bedroom even had a double bed and a single bed because my little brother and I shared a room when we were really young. All the rooms were wallpapered. My bedroom had small roses that marched across the walls in neat rows. I can remember laying in bed and counting roses in the moonlight. My bedroom faced the east and overlooked the driveway. Sometimes I could hear Dad come in late at night in the summertime. He farmed, so he kept farmers’ hours — up at daylight and worked well past sunset. Of course, the old house didn’t have central air. Boy, did it get hot upstairs, especially in my room because it’s not too often you get an easterly breeze in the summer. A box fan in the window was standard procedure in the summer. Each of the rooms had a floor vent so a little heat might make its way to our bedrooms in the winter. I can remember one time Mom telling the story of taking hot bricks wrapped in towels to bed to keep her feet warm when she was a little girl. My little brother and I thought that was so cool we started doing it, too. There was a floor furnace in the house, so it was really easy to warm up those bricks. And the floor furnace was a great way to warm up after coming in from playing out in the snow. It was a good way to dry out gloves and hats, too. You just had to remember not to leave the mittens on the furnace too long. My favorite stocking hat, a Tootsie Roll hat, got a big scorch mark on it because I forgot about it. When we got a little older, I got jealous, although I’m not sure that’s the right word, of a classmate. Her dad had a big farm he farmed. And she always talked about how she and her siblings had to go cut shattercane out of the corn fields. One summer, I decided Marlin and I could do that, too. We must have been about 10 and 12. We dug around in the shed until we found some machetes, and off we went across the field to cut the cane. Boy, have times changed. There’s no way I’d let Drew have a machete. No telling what body part he’d cut off. We lasted only a couple hours and then decided Dad could harvest the shattercane along with the corn. I’m not sure we can ever make life that simple again. But there are days when I’d chuck it all and go back to hacking out the shattercane and taking hot bricks to bed.
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