Just your average childhood

Just your average childhood
I suppose that I have led a relatively boring life. I suppose this for two reasons really, first, I constantly find myself escaping it to much more interesting worlds created in my head and second because I can’t think of a single interesting story for this years beloved Christmas eve story extravaganza bonanza extraordinaire. So I will tell many. I’m going to attempt to recount the myriad experiences that I had growing up in a sort of random free association format. Consider this a pretty rough draft, (it is Christmas Eve for crying out loud.) Here we go.
Our house itself was an epicenter of activity, from the labyrinth of bush tunnels in the front yard to the secret forest behind our pool. And the back path leading from there to the grass and the climbing tree, which was very near to the hole in the sandbox and just around the corner from there were the feared woodpile full of spiders and beehive full of, well, bees of course. All these things added up to endless hours of imagining and playing. Mike and I were particularly fond of climbing up on the roof and throwing our cabbage patch kids off and jumping after them. Aaron introduced me to his secret club of sorts under the house where our clay creations (mined from the sandbox area) could exist in silent solitude. We also explored the attic at great lengths.
Inside the house I spent much of my time creating lego masterpieces and other pieces of art. And let’s not forget the ever popular sport of balcony diving. I was never too good at that though.
Just up the street were the Joneses. I spent a lot of my time there playing with Richard. He came along on a lot of my adventures. Including muscle men in his sandbox and power rings made of Barry’s bakery white bread. Our last great adventure together was us staying up late popping caps across the street and both thinking that we were going to get into so much trouble for being out so late. That was actually the end of all these adventures because that was my last night in that house.
In the near vicinity were the new houses. Which afforded us with many exploration runs finding knotholes and for me the incredible little foam sticky things on new windows. There was also a tree house in that area that we worked on and around which I seem to have found a very old penny. There were also dirt mounds to ride our bikes on. That was fun until I managed to fly through the air and land underneath my bike.
That was all east of the house, just to the west was a little trail that served as a shortcut to 7-eleven and all the treasures therein. Fun-dip, big league chew, cherry-clan, Alexander the grape, lemon-heads, and who could forget garbage pail kids gum.
A little further west was hiking at black diamond mines, also known in my world as the shire and other parts of middle earth, I never saw a hobbit but I just knew they were there. After all, treebeard was there and so were many mineshafts that must have lead to a flaming balrog eventually. The Manhattan canyon trails, ridge trail, star mine loop were all good trails. It was also quite fun roasting our dinner at the swallows’ nests.
These are just the memories of home growing up. All the camping trips to MacKerriker and Saddlebag and Red’s will have to wait for another reminiscing session.
Matthew 2004