Memory Lane.........

I've been feeling a bit melancholy lately. I've been thinking about days gone by....things that I used to have, do, etc. And indulging myself a little bit in missing those things. So, lucky you, if you choose to read this, you get to walk with me down the proverbial 'memory lane'.

One of my favorite childhood memories is waking up to the sounds of the trains passing. The train track was right behind my house. It was house, back yard (big back yard), pond, then train tracks. If I woke up early enough to hear the first train whistle then I could jump out of bed, get dressed, and run down the path to the tracks early enough to put a penny on the track before the train got there. Then I would sit back on the path and wait for the train. The train almost always stopped when it got to my part of the track. That's because the end of the train would stretch far enough down the track to reach into town where it would unload lumber at the little lumber yard in town. The train would be stopped for maybe 30 minutes. Plenty of time to climb aboard. We would climb the ladders on the side of the cars, play on, around and under the train. We always knew when it was getting ready to start up again so we had plenty of time to jump off and get to safely back on the path. When the train had gone we would gather our pennies and maybe some coal that it had dropped and wander back home for breakfast.

I miss the lake house, too. When I was about 10 my parent's bought a lake house. It was about an hour drive from our house to the lake. We would go mostly on weekends, but often stayed longer. The lake house was a different world for us. There was one phone and it was a party line (shared with someone else) so we rarely used it. My mother declared early on that there would be NO TV at the lake, so on the days that it rained we would have marathon Monopoly games, get our exercise by pumping on the player piano or do puzzles. Outside, there was swimming, fishing, canoeing, water-skiing, a rope swing over the lake, mini-bikes to ride in the field or just laying in the hammock and listening to the water lap the shore. After my mom died my dad couldn't bear to go to the lake house any more....the memories were too much. I loved going there for the same reason. I could still feel her there. My dad sold the place to my oldest brother and that was that. It wasn't my lake house anymore. It changed the feel of the place and I couldn't go there anymore either.

It was a different world when I was a kid. The world was a safer place and we had SO much freedom. From the time I was about 7 or 8 years old we would walk the train tracks into town (or ride our bikes on a VERY busy road and across a VERY 'rickety' bridge!!)

We would spend the day in town, maybe going to Excelsior Beach to swim and buy Popsicles from the little concession stand, or go to a Saturday matinee movie. We would pay $1 for a movie ticket, small drink and popcorn. And sometimes, if we stayed after the movie to help clean up the theater, the manager would give us a free candy bar!! There was always a Saturday matinee. It was usually a cartoon movie or a cowboy one, and we would come out of the theater into the bright afternoon sunlight.

There was also an amusement park in our little town. We would need about $4-5 for that. But could spend hours there with that amount of money. Tickets were about $.10 and each ride was only 2 or 3 tickets. There was one ride where you would sit in a swing and it would swing out over the lake. There was a carousel, a wooden roller coaster, a ferris wheel, bumber cars and a fun house. We didn't go there as often as it was so expensive, but we did go a couple of times a month in the summer.

There was very little adult supervision. Mom would just give us a dollar for the movie and send us on our way. We would be gone for hours. Wandering around town, checking out the library, or the bakery, or the Ben Franklin store where you could buy almost anything you could ever need/want. Then, once we were tired we would ride or walk back home, usually in time for dinner.

I miss those childhood days. I sometimes long for them. I didn't have any worries in those days. No real challenges. Life was an adventure. The dangers of the railroad tracks or the 'rickety' bridge were very real, yet we ignored the dangers and lived for the adventure. I wish I could have the same bravado that I did when I was 8.

Maybe I'll give it a try!