When I was a kid...i too remember treats from my maternal grandma...we travelled a thousand miles to visit her and she always had made yellow sponge cupcakes with vanilla icecream and froze them. On a hot summer day, frozen cupcakes are the best!
I still remember what her yard and house smelled like. Now my Aunt lives in it and fixed it up real nice and it's on the historical homes list...with it going back to a great relative...with the name "Ireland."
Speaking of hippity hops...they still have those around. I LOVED my hippity hop...it's handles were attached to a rubber horse head.
My sister's tricked me and would wash their "delicates" & lay them between 2 towels and tell me to hop on them because it was..."fun."
when i was a kid, i remember my grandpa's backyard, he had the perfect rolling hill, you could start at the top, and by the time you rolled all the way to the bottom, you were so dizzy you couldn't stand up for like an hour, it was fun! Our back yard had a hill too, but it went down into the neighbors yard i remember one year i got the bright idea to sled down this hill, and i ended up in the creek on the other side of the neighbor's yard, that was cold!
When I was a kid, I remember going to grandpas farm,gettting chased by the guineas, riding the old work horse bareback,, and playing in the barn..one time my brothers and I opened the door of the barn leading to the pig pen, and called "suuueeeeyyy" and the pigs all came running, we almost didn't get the door shut in time....we sat ther and laughed for along time.
Another favorite memory is taking homemade fishing poles... long sticks with string and a hook and some bread, make doughballs out of the bread, catch crayfish, cut off their tails take out the meat and then go upstream to a little dam and catch bass with the crayfish meat. One time my little brother was laying on his belly and looking over the edge of the little bridge that we would catch the crayfish from, and he fell in the creek..my twin brother jumped in and pulled him out. We took him home, snuck past mom and went and cleaned him up..We thought mom never knew, but years later when we told her, she said she knew, because she washed the wet clothes!
My brother, cousin, and I would go out into the mountains surrounding the homeplace and be gone all day. My grandpa literally owned the mountains surrounding the place. Sometimes I would take the horse and I would be Annie Oakley and our hideout would be the old mill house or an unused hog pen, lol. The mill house was more fun because it was so big.
You could also sit on the hill hiding up under the rhododendrons(sp?) and watch the game warden stock the river with trout or once in a while he would be chasing guys down the road because they were growing a "plant" that they shouldn't, lol.
When I was a kid (a city raised kid in San Diego area), we would travel to my grandparents almond ranch in Yuba City CA outside Sacramento. There we would gather eggs, help with chores and run through the orchards.
Grampa loved having us follow him around and I am sure it took 3 times as long to get his work done, but he always had time to crack a fresh walnut or almond for us, or walk us up to the railroad tracks so we could wave and the trains or climb an orange tree with us to pick oranges.
Grama would be in the house cooking. She made fresh tortillas by hand for every meal. We would stand by the stove and snitch them as they came off the griddle. We played with her chickens and the rooster would chase us back to the house. In later years she said she would watch us from the kitchen window and when we started screaming and running to the house, she would open the screen door (a wooden one that whapped shut on a spring), we would run in and she would shut the door on the rooster.
Once when we were playing outside, feeding the hens, she walked out, grabbed one, twirled it around her head and then didn't understand why we wouldn't eat the good arroz con pollo for dinner that night.
But the most favorite thing, the thing that still sticks in my memory is every morning, Grampa would wake us up at 6 A.M. in summer and we would walk through the early slightly foggy morning through the orchard, over a little bridge on the irrigation ditch to a clearing where we burned the previous days trash. I can still smell the burning trash and still see Grampa's silhouette as I looked up at him in the foggy orchard as he tended the fire with an arm around each of us, silently watching the morning dawn.
When I was kid....
I remember summers; swimming at the city pool, bike rides on country roads, sitting under the swamp cooler, going to the "penny-candy" store, putting pennies on the train tracks in hopes they would get smashed, looking for crawdads in the canals, and never wanting school to start up again.
We were quite unsupervised. Not unhappy, just not really safe, I don't think. We would walk to the creek about 3 miles from our house and stay until dark when my mom would finally come looking for us. We snagged each other with fishing lures more times than I can count. We used to take a box of matches from the kitchen and go to the woods behind the house with our dolls (I HATED dolls). We would find a clearing and set a small fire. My doll would then be placed in the fire and start "screaming for help" while my brother's G I Joe's and such would come to her rescue. We played on the railroad tracks constantly and I remember a few narrow misses with some of my brother's friends. It kinda scares me when I think of the things we survived!!!
Angie - That picture is the cutest! Thanks for sharing.
Let's see - When I was a kid, we traveled somewhere every summmer. Not first class, just drove in the car, towing a tiny little pop-up camper. My favorite times were going out through the Black Hills of SD, through the mountains of MT, to relatives houses in WA. Being a kid from MN, I loved being out by the ocean.
I remember one time in particular I was about 7. We were out on a wharf north of Seattle, I was barefoot, walking along on the wharf. Before I knew it, I was standing in the middle of an extremely hot sheet of iron which was laying on the wharf being warmed by the sun. I did the hotfoot dance off the sheet and jumped into the ocean to cool my burning tootsies.