At home

The working from home thing has gotten off to a good start.
I worked on a few ongoing jobs and got a surprising call on another. So I’ve got that going on.
I actually got a lot more done than I had expected as this week is Spring Break at the school, so Maddie is at home. She usually needs to be entertained when we’re at home, so I really didn’t know how today would go. However,
we’re having our roof worked on this week and the roofer brought his daughter (who is also out of school) and a couple of her friends along. They are all about the same age and I hardly heard a peep out of them all day. (Well, except for the howling. I don’t know what the game was, but they were howling like a pack of coyotes most of the day.)
The weather was really nice today so they played out in the woods and pasture and barn. Maddie got wore out and a little bit of a sunburn. They had a great time.
It made me think about playing outside in the summer when I was a kid.
I grew up in Plains, Kansas, which is about half the size of Perkins. There were probably 30 kids in our immediate neighborhood, so you could always count on having something to do.
Of course, this was before video or computer games. We only had three channels on the television and, other than Saturday mornings, there wasn’t a lot of kids programming, anyway.
But outdoors, there were oodles of things to do. We’d play freeze tag, put on our own plays, make forts, invent our own games, or just hang out.
Red Light/Green Light, Red Rover, Duck/Goose, Spotlight and riding bikes filled our days.
We’d walk barefoot uptown to the pool on hot days, and were always sorry we forgot our flip-flops when we had to cross the hot, black asphalt on Main Street. That stuff was so hot, it felt like a sizzling, mushy marshmallow as you ran across. It felt so good to put your seared feet in the pool.
At night, we’d lay on the ground and look at the stars. Funny, but you could see the stars so much better back then. I really have to look now to find the Milky Way.
Light pollution, National Geographic says. That’s a topic for another post.