Games We Played

We had no Nintendo or Sega Genesis. In fact we had very few toys, and what we had, we had to share. So many of our games were made up. At least we had to be creative.

In the evening we usually played on the road. There were not many cars in those days, so that was no problem. Also, since there were seven of us, and fourteen children across the road, neither one of our mothers wanted all of us at their house, so the road was neutral territory. Of course we weren't all playing, as some of us were not "in running order" yet.

Sometimes we played "frog." We'd sit in the ditches in the long grass. Whoever could whistle, would whistle like frogs. Those who couldn't whistle had to take the part of the bull frogs and croak. I never did learn to whistle, so I always had to croak. We made quite a frog chorus. It didn't sound much different than the real frogs in the nearby ponds that we often heard at night.

Often we played policeman. Anyone who was caught doing something we weren't supposed to be doing landed in "jail". The jail was our granary. We'd be put in there, in the dark, with the door closed and had to stay there as long as the "policeman" thought we should stay.

Many evenings we caught June bugs. We would lock them up in our mailbox. With so many of us doing the "catching", imagine the surprise of our rural mailman when he found the box full of June bugs the next day when he delivered the mail. Sometimes we caught fireflies. We'd put them into glass jars, so we could see their lights. We'd soon let them go though, because we didn't want them to die.

Speaking of toys, at one time my older sisters got a wagon. I wasn't there yet at this time. By the time I grew up enough to use a wagon, there was nothing left of it but the front wheels and the handle. We still had lots of fun tearing around with it. Later, my youngest sister got a red wagon, which was to be her very own. She still has this wagon, keeping it as a precious memory of her childhood. She did, however, let her grandchildren play with it when they came to her house.

During the day, when we had playing time, we were in the woods. It was right next to our orchard and we could go there anytime. We gathered flowers, always with the feeling that we couldn't stop picking until we had gathered every one of them. We came home with arm loads of flowers, and Mother always put them in water for us. It's a wonder she never told us to stop bringing them home. She probably thought that it was quite a harmless way to keep us busy.

In the woods, we played house a lot, gathering big rocks for chairs. We also gathered moss and made rugs, and covered our chairs with it. We gathered sticks and made tepees.

One day, after a storm. we found that a big tree had fallen down right across our path that led to the raspberry patch. We put our creativity to work and turned this tree into a fairground. The fair was something we just heard about, but never got to go to it., so now we made our own. We pretended the different branches were rides, and we named them the Ferris wheel, merry-go-round, etc. We would sit on the branch and jump up and down, pretending to be on the ride the branch represented. Even though they all rode the same, it was still a lot of fun for us, and often we would take a day off from our house-playing and go to the fair!

So, even though we didn't have very many toys, we still had a lot of fun, and had to be creative to do so.