Half Cent Exploring

When we lived in Fort Covington, up on the Canadian border, we lived in a manse (preacher's provided house) with a huge back yard. In the summer, we planted a vegetable garden that covered most of it, but in the spring and fall when the ground was fallow, we kids loved to explore. In fact, we probably spent more time outside than in (this was before the era of video games and movies - even television wasn't all that big a deal).

Back behind the plowed ground where the garden grew as a strip of land that was "wild." We had to wade through a section of weeds to get to it. We went there so often that we wore a path through the burdocks and milkweed, but sometimes as we passed through, we got burrs in our hair or stuck to our clothes.

No one weeded or plowed or cleared the wild strip. Half the property was on our land, the other half belonged to the trailer park behind our house. A broken down wire fence ran through the strip, marking where our property ended and theirs began. There were huge trees that had fallen over in some past storm, and the branches still had leaves clinging to them. We would climb up the long heavy trunk of one of them and pretend to be pirates or conquerors or mountain climbers or whatever we wanted to be.

Sometimes kids from the trailer park would come and play with us - I especially remember Leslie and Curtis. She and I would be the damsels in distress and my brothers and her brother would come rescue us, brandishing stick "swords" and gazing through fake looking glasses pointing off the port bow. We dragged odd sheets and old buckets and anything else we could scrounge as props for our various scenarios. It was grand fun.

Sometimes we would play back there for hours and no one worried about where we were or what we were doing. Our neighborhood was safe and kidnapping only happened in our imaginations. Our faces tanned under the gentle sun and our bodies grew strong and healthy from all the climbing about.

It was way more fun than the play gym sets that we all had in our back yards. In the spring our hideout would flood and we waded about with yellow rubber boots and slickers. Sometimes the frigid water would seep into our boots and soak our socks and squish loudly when we walked. In the fall the leaves mounded up and we loved to jump from the tree trunk into a strategic pile of leaves. Everyone from the neighborhood joined in. We knew everybody's name and where they lived and who their parents were.

As we grew and school activities took up more time, we played less often in our wild strip. Birds and rabbits and squirrels retook their territory and eventually, the dead trees rotted. It was grand while it lasted and every once in awhile I call almost hear Curtis cry "Avast, me hearties!"