“Down in the valley where the green grass grows,
There sits Wanda, sweet as a rose.
Along comes ———— and kisses her on the cheek.
How many kisses will she get this week?
One . . . two . . . three. . .four . . . ”
My Knightstown neighbor buddy, Wanda Frazier, and I chanted this jingle when we skipped rope. We were outdoor children during the summer. We went out after breakfast, returned for noon dinner and five o’clock supper, and went out again until it grew dark. A day seemed to last forever.
There being no television or electronic games in that bygone era, we invented our own fun. Our parents pretty much left us alone and didn’t manage or fuss. We pulled up dried cornstalks in Zimmerman’s lot between my house and the Big 4 railroad and propped them against each other to form an Indian teepee. Mother showed us how to use a hatchet to chop sticks into fence posts that we stuck in the ground and strung cord around to form fences for fields and corals. We used grass for piles of hay and made mud pies for provisions. We made little ante-bellum dolls out of hollyhocks.
Children during World War II, we also jumped up and down on the lot’s falling-down fence, shouting,
“Order in the court! Order in the court!
The judge wants some beans.
Hitler’s in the bathtub, sinking sub-a-marines!”
Alas, I fell and cut my knee which required stitches and — oh God! — shots.
One of the best things was a swing that Mother made in our maple tree. Wanda and I tied it in a knot through which we inserted a long board, thus forming a sort of swinging teeter-totter. Mother also nailed up steps and made a seat and backrests in our maple tree. Years later, nephew John hauled a big cardboard box up there to be a house that no one else was permitted to enter.
Every summer we cleaned our garage as my parents didn’t own a car and turned it into a clubhouse. One year we founded The Nancy Drew Mystery Club. That was the year that Rex Mattix concocted the Black Dot Gang who snatched kids from their beds. I begged my parents to nail my bedroom window shut. Wanda had a bunch of dress-up clothes in her garage.
Certain places were designated for certain games. The big maple tree in front of the home of our next-door neighbor, Auntie Kelly, was base for evening hide-and-seek and tappy-on-the-icebox. I checked the Internet, that fount of information, and found nothing. “It” hid his eyes, and a player used a finger to trace a circle on “It’s” back while intoning with a disguised voice, “I’ll draw the circle; now who’ll put the dot?” Another player poked “It.” Then everyone ran and hid. Gertrude Scovel’s yard was used for statues and Chinese tag.
Kids of various ages would gather to play kick-the-can on Carey St. next to our house. We were allowed to hide in the neighbors’ yards so long as we didn’t get in their flower beds. One time Mardella Anderson Spears and I collided, and went bawling to my mother for comfort. The most exciting form of hide-and-seek was bicycle slips that we played in the evening, racing our bicycles through the alleys and around the tile factory that later became Tweedys’ Lumber Co.
How pleasant it is to recall in reverie “those days of the lost sunshine” as that fine poet James Whitcomb Riley called them in “Out to Old Aunt Mary’s.”
I’ve come to understand how important the mind’s ear is to memory. I can still faintly hear down through the years the scrape of the jump rope and slap of our feet against the sidewalk, the whir-r-r-r-r-r and clatter of our steel ball-bearing sidewalk skates, and “It” yelling, “Over the can with Billy Vanduyn!” . . . wclarke@comcast.net