Another "Melanie Question"

Once again I happened to read one of my daughter's daily questions on Facebook. This one said, "What was your favorite summer activity when you were a kid?"
Well, my life was pretty boring, let me tell you. We lived on a farm. My mother didn't drive. She baked for a local grocery store to help put my sister through nurses training. I read and played piano.
But I thought, I did do something that was fun when I was about 8 or 9. I looked at the comments that people had answered Melanie's question with and it went like this: swimming, swimming, swimming in the river. (I was one of the very first people to read her question.)  "Hmm," I thought, I had only gone swimming once in my life and didn't like it when I was a little girl. I can still "smell" the chlorine in the air at the pool in Holstein, Iowa.
So I decided to answer my daughter's question truthfully.
When I was young, yes, I was an avid reader. Along with the Little House On The Prairie books, I loved the Boxcar Children books. I had and have an avid imagination so I asked my mom if I could go hiking and take a lunch. She said, "sure." and packed my lunch in one of my dad's farmer hankies. It was really fancy; homemade bread and butter and a quart canning jar with water in it. If she sprinkled sugar on my bread and butter, I wouldn't be surprised. She did that a lot for an afternoon treat.

Cattails by the creek

Okay, I was "hoboing" it and off I would go. I walked  through Iowa prairie grass that followed a very shallow little creek that seldom had more than three or four inches of water in it. My life wasn't as exciting as the orphans, but to me it was as good as it got.
The first thing that I would do is to lay down in that tall grass and look up into the sky. I loved looking at the clouds and imagining shapes of animals etc. that they made. My sister, Rosie, taught me how to do that from our bedroom window.
A person has no idea how noisy a field of prairie grass is if you had not done as child as I did; just being still and listening. There were no airplanes, trucks, tractors, cars going fast down the highway. We lived about a quarter of a mile off of the highway. To an adult walking through the grass the air was only disturbed by birds chirping. Down on the ground I could hear crickets, grasshoppers, and the swishing of the grass itself in the breeze. There must have been a gazillion ants and beetles and who knows what, but I loved it! Would I do it now, no way.
When I tired of that I would eat my lunch and drink some of my water and catch tadpoles in my canning jar. I was fascinated with them. My mother was not. She was not happy with the condition of my grass stained dress either. No slacks for little girls in those days.

Melanie asks the questions I get to reminisce!

I did go "hiking" again once or twice, but it was not as fun because I had to worry about my dress getting stained.
I'm sitting here typing thinking, "It was too bad you didn't have a dog to go with you on your hikes, you might have enjoyed it more." We had off and on dogs. They were strays I think sometimes by their own choice. Another story someday.