Day 767 Motley Crew

 

Wild children living their best lives in the early 70's. Yup, this was me and my siblings with our pony, Mr. D., mostly shirtless, shoeless and looking like a bunch of ruffians straight out of the woods. My once long hair had been cut to give me the famous, Dorothy Hamill hairstyle, somehow I'm not sure I wore it as well as she did. My siblings and I had the run of the woods surrounding our house, right down to the pond. We rode Mr. D around the yard or down the fire trails, picked veggies out of my dads garden, ate brine pickles out of a big vat kept in the workshop, stacked wood into our white elephant barn and rescued barn swallows every spring from the big barn. We had goats, chickens, ducks and a cow named Cheeseburger (yup, he became one)! On a typical summer day we were kicked outside and knew not to think about going back inside until dinner. Winter days were similar, skating on the pond all day, walking back home with frozen toes after a full day outside. Parents didn't organize play, listen to groans of boredom or worry about our water intake or sunscreen.  We learned quickly what plants were edible, not to get our shoes wet (if we had any on at all) and a host of other valuable survival skills. I don't recall fighting with my siblings, we needed each other and for the most part, took care of one another. You'll never hear a kid born in the sixties say they are bored, we learned from a young age to entertain ourselves. The focus was never for us to read more, study harder although both my parents were educators, they knew we would pick all that up along the way but the skills we learned from the great outdoors couldn't be taught. These memories seem like a lifetime ago, but helped form the people we became and signs of these young kids live within us all. I'll be attending my nieces wedding this weekend and this motley crew will be under the same roof once again. My brother Chri and his wife will be staying with me and my kids at the Air BnB and i'm beyond excited to have some time with him (he's in the hip striped pants...so cool). If you're thinking Chri was a typo and that I forgot the S, nope. When Chri was learning to write he found the S too difficult to master so dropped it from his name...almost as cool as those stripped pants! I'm sure we'll all look fancier, have shirts and shoes on at least and hopefully better haircuts. We'll be there to share in my sisters joy as she see's her daughter walk down the aisle, our inner wild child within us always.