The manure pile, which was built in the field nearest the barn throughout a snowy winter, was a messy mountain before the ground was supposedly solid enough to handle the weight of the WC and the spreader.
The spreader was an old hand that had survived broken aprons and labored with a beater weighed down with a mass of twine strings. The first rushed foray into the field was almost always too early, which meant the tractor ended up stuck in mud.
It may have been operator error because wiser hands knew enough to avoid wetter spots. Under a previous owner, the pile’s location was where dead work horses were buried. Remains of large teeth worked to the surface, which in my youthful enthusiasm were assumed to belong to a dinosaur or wooly mammoth.
Mother played along with the assumption because it was harmless and entertaining. Entertainment wasn’t hard to find in the spring when it was still too early for field work.
A basketball hoop — the first one constructed from a wicker basket and then a real one acquired through unknown means — was nailed up in the nearly empty hayloft. Fouls were left uncalled, but play stopped when an errant or not so unintentional elbow loosened a tooth or blackened an eye. Reprisals were freely administered, which caused hard feelings that didn’t last long. We needed, after all, to get along to get along.
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A ditch that ran the course of the lawn was filled with flowing water and became an avenue for boat races. Sticks shed by the maples in the yard were ideal vessels. The winner was whoever’s "boat" emerged first from the culvert’s mouth. Wannabe engineers made new drainage ditches in the yard and lost shoes in the mud.
The stream in which the water flowed was an unnamed creek filled with bullheads, suckers and what we called crayfish. We caught fish with makeshift lines and seined crayfish with a strainer plucked from a kitchen cabinet without mother’s permission. We planned, when summer came, to camp in the pasture; eat mother’s strawberry shortcake or when we were flush with cash, Twinkies purchased from the tiny grocery store that served our neighborhood well. Later, when we were older, the drive-in offered quarts of sweet root beer.
My older brothers were skilled in fashioning sling shots from discarded inner tubes. The red tubes, it was said, made the strongest material. The sling shots were armed with acorns and corn cobs. Cobs, hitting at close range, stung. Acorns, mother and other adults warned, could take an eye out.
Nothing as bad as that happened, but a wounded, crying child often brought the game to an end. One of my brothers who had a beef with me, hit me with a BB gun pellet. His defense, when confronted by our mother, was that he was aiming at my legs and not my head.
It is remarkable that no one was seriously maimed.
The safer sport involved corn cobs and chicken tail feathers. Three feathers pushed into the soft end of a cob were thrown and twirled a good distance before crashing to the earth. A dark feather mingled with two white ones added a certain elegance to a flight.
Discarded cardboard boxes were repurposed into forts, barns and houses that provided hours of entertainment.
Today’s children seem less interested in made-up entertainment because they have access to and are skilled in computers and video games. It is obvious that they are growing up in a much different world than we did. Time marches on, and the world has changed in many positive ways.
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However, I’m unsure that a computer game can possibly match the excitement of winning a stick race, watching a feathered corn cob take flight, and imaging a cardboard box as a fortress.
