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I just don’t see kids playing outside! By playing, I don’t mean at the soccer, baseball, or school football fields where the organized sports are played, taught and supervised by adults. I mean PLAYING — swinging on a swing, legs stretched out in front as the swing moves forward, torso leaning back, then torso forward and legs tucked in as the swing moves backward, child going higher and higher with every repeat of this motion. Or kids playing catch with a baseball or football. Or kids shooting hoops at someone’s garage. Or kids running through a lawn sprinkler. Or kids riding their bikes down the road.
As summer wanes and the first day of the new school year draws near, I am looking back on summer days gone by. For my brothers and sisters and me, after doing the few chores assigned to us, we had hours and hours to roam about the neighborhood, finding ways to entertain ourselves.
My constant companions in childhood were two of my sisters, Patty and Melanie. We were bookended by Julie, Joe, and Willie, all older than me, and Chris and Mike, both younger than Melanie. Each of us was almost exactly one and a half years apart, except Chris and Mike who were 15 days short of being called Irish twins. Our youngest sister, Rebekah, born the year I graduated from high school, was a second family for my parents, a different generation altogether.
We three middle girls ran together much of the time, often with the large population of girls our age in our small neighborhood. When we weren’t at home entertaining ourselves, lying on the lawn looking at the sky, deciding what each cloud formation looked like before the breezes changed its shape, or on a really hot day, running through the lawn sprinkler which our mother had strategically placed so at least half the time it sprinkled the hot cement on the driveway, where we could lie on our stomachs, enjoying the musky odor of warm cement, we were at a neighbor’s house making up some form of entertainment.
The Kriescher family who lived in the next block behind our house, figured big in our childhood. We were free to run through Grandma Kriescher’s large backyard, next to ours to the home of her granddaughters, Karen and Carol. We often visited their grandma next door, playing Go Fish at her kitchen table, crunching away on her large, round sugar cookies, lightly dusted with flour. Grandma Kriescher’s accent and maybe the way she used words were influenced by her Belgian heritage. Grandma Kriescher said ain’t. She also didn’t use the plural form of the word “you” in the way we learned it, but said “yous,” instead. Those words were forbidden in my house, but we were admonished by our mother to never correct our elderly friend. I loved listening to her talk.
We made up plays, dressing up in long gowns and shawls and hats borrowed from Mrs. Kriescher’s famous consignment rummage sales, then invited our mothers to sit in chairs on the Kriescher driveway facing the garage, which served as our stage, to watch us as we bumbled along with our made-up stories, Kool-aid and cookies provided. Later in the fall that same garage became a spook house, complete with slippery spaghetti and marbles, to have our unwitting customers, who paid a small fee for the experience, squish their fingers through the slimy mixture.
In our own backyard, there were raspberries and rhubarb to pick. Sometimes our mother would allow a small cup of sugar for us to share. We’d dip our long stems of raw rhubarb in, then crunch away, our tanned and sweaty faces puckering up in pleasure.
On occasion, we were allowed to hop on our bicycles and ride to the other end of our road, cut through our grade school playground, and cross Ninth Street to Austin’s store, a meat market that also was a small grocery store. Just inside the door were empty cases of pop bottles, stacked carefully high, waiting to be exchanged for full cases to sell. Nearby was the open freezer case, our intended aim, full of individual ice creams to buy. Along with the ice cream sandwiches, cones, and bars, were my favorite pick, the orange Dreamsicles.
On the Fourth of July, we’d gathered on our front porch just after dark. Our dad took charge of this annual event, lighting the first sparkler. The rest of us lit ours from that one, then ran in our bare feet to the backyard, behind our garage, and around to the front yard, twirling our sparking sticks, writing our names in the air. Our sparkler spent, we carefully put it in the large tin can provided. We’d get another one, and off we’d go, again. On that night, and many summer nights, we ended our long days lying on our backs to watch for shooting stars.
Now, as the gentle hum of crickets lulls me to sleep at night, I forget about the troubles and pressures of the day, and those that were part of my childhood, that sometimes loom large to haunt me even now. Our fun and games with our friends and with each other often served as a saving grace, a place to go for a little while. That was a great gift, one that I wish for all children, everywhere.
Doreen moved to the woods from Green Bay in 1984, married back-to-the-lander Steve O’Donnell, and stayed to raise their three children after he died in 1997. Dave Short joined her there in 2016. Doreen welcomes feedback at doreenshort2021@gmail.com.
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