In Which You Hear About My Childhood

1. We used to live in a large-ish town/ smallish city, and our house was up against the hills, with just the railroad between us and the big grassy slopes. We walked a lot more then- we would go up and walk along the railroad tracks when the trains weren't going by, we would walk to the school and play on the playground, we would walk through the neighborhood and down to the Thrifty to buy ice cream cones at the ice cream counter there. I liked the mint chocolate chip ice cream, and we would sit on the curb outside the store, eating our cones before we walked back home. I remember going on afternoon walks around the less familiar streets in our neighborhood, while one or the other of us kids learned to ride a bike. I kind of miss those days, when we had the time to take walks just for fun.

2. Also during that little-kid era: we had an ugly little barbeque, one of those dome-shaped ones that looks like a UFO. Sometimes we would cook marshmallows on it in the backyard at nighttime, and sometimes we would sit out late at night watching meteor showers. And oh! When it rained, our patio would flood and we would call it Lake Smith* and when it wasn't raining we would play in and around the big old pepper tree that grew in the back corner of the yard. We had a garden that sometimes grew tomatoes and we sometimes made mudmen (like snowmen, only we lived in a snow-deprived region) and set them up to dry on the brick wall, and after the earthquake we used the bricks that fell down to build mansions for our tiny troll dolls. We also had a horribly dangerous swingset that wasn't quite embedded in the ground enough and the slide had an upsetting slope. Our backyard was a magical place.

*last name changed, but you get the picture

3. Our family used to get together with another family fairly often, and we would all sing folk songs with the parents on guitars and the kids singing for awhile, until we as kids got bored and went off to play games elsewhere in the house. The parents would continue singing for awhile, but would end up just sitting around talking. I know this because once the singing stopped, we would all sneak back into the computer room, which was attached to the living room by long cutouts in the top of the wall. We would stand on the back of the couch and peer over, listening in on the conversation of the adults. It generally ended up not being very interesting to us, but it was still thrilling to spy.