Things I miss from my childhood

I was a child until the age of eight. After that, I felt I was too old to play with dolls or go on the merry-go-round anymore. Because I was the oldest of four kids, I was called upon to help my mother with meals and cleaning. That probably influenced my thinking. Anyway, I remember being a child.

I enjoyed playing Jacks with other girls at school and felt like I was good at it. I loved being in school on a rainy day, or walking home from school on a sunny autumn afternoon. There was the wonderful day our class was marched across the street to the Carnegie Library and introduced to the children's section. It was always a treat to come home from school to the aroma of freshly baked bread; sometimes Mom would even make cinnamon raisin bread.

I remember the cheer that would go up in the theater when they showed a cartoon before a movie (it was like dessert). I would sit on the floor in front of the radio straining to listen to "Let's Pretend" through the static on Saturday mornings.

There was also the springtime fun of walking the ditches with my siblings hunting for wild asparagus. In the summer, we always had a great time going to visit cousins up north. It was such fun to play on the farm and build a playhouse in the grove with junk from the trash pile. Then we would play dress-up with old clothes or fashion wedding dresses out of old curtains. We picked crabapples and chokecherries
and couldn't eat them, but it was fun because we were away from home.