What have come to symbolize your childhood?

The outdoors. I loved to play outdoors all the time, you would rarely see me stuck inside the house for more than a couple hours.

Riding my bike for hours on end, around the country house we used to live in. I miss the country.

Making “backyard stew” in a huge pot, using dirt, water, leaves, sticks, flower petals and wild onions.

Also, the smell of the wild onions every time Daddy mowed.

@erichw1504 I think that’s on reason why kids today have so many allergies-they don’t play outside enough and then when they are exposed to normal amounts of pollen, etc., their bodies go haywire…

Climbing trees, swimming in the neighbor’s pool and Lake Huron, runing around like a wild woman with long hair (getting dirty) and not a care in the world.

@yankeetooter True. I wonder what kind of answers you would get if you answered this question 20 years from now.

Swimming,drawing,Barbie dolls,horsebackriding,cottage,and having knock-down-drag out brawls with my sister. XD

Outside exploring our woods, we had created these names for the places in the woods like Rock City, and The Cove where we would go. I mean we would walk miles from our houses in the woods during the day and it was so great just to explore. Sledding in the winter, skating on our pond in the backyard, playing Capture the Flag, Checkers, Card Games, Atari Space Invaders.

Reading, badminton, riding my bike, walks in the woods, swimming, chasing after the ice cream truck, singing, playing the piano, watching thunderstorms, etc., etc., etc.

Bottom work up front after 60 years = DISASTER
Struggle
Inconsistancy
No structure
No adult supervission
Chause
Pandemonium
Harassment
Abuse
Craziness
Squaller
(Life has been good ever since I left “home”)

@gondwanalon :(

I remember one time the ice cream truck was coming, so we ran in the house to get money. By the time we got out of the house, it was headed around the block. We chased after it, and my shoe fell off, but I kept on running around the block. (I went back and got my shoe afterwards, but I got my snowball.)

a couple of cows named after love and candy

@yankeetooter Lol, yeah! Chasing the Ice cream van down the street. ; D

I can’t believe that I am telling this, but, all of my friends and I had long hair. We had one friend who was horse freak (loved horses). We used to prance around and pretend that we were horses, lol. Pretend that we were eating grass and galloping along, lmao. We would also get on our bikes and bike two miles to a country farm, so, that we could feed the horses. When you’re 9, 2 miles seems awfully far. Yes, we were nine.

Don’t judge.

My sister still teases me about it to this day.

Endless rolling suburbs lined with trees, forests, bodies of water, model rockets…

Again, I’m with @erichw1504 on this. I spent my childhood outside. In rain, snow and sunshine. I came home for lunch and was off again. Does any child do this now?

Laying on my back, on the backyard lawn, watching the clouds float by, and a maybe a seagull or listening to small plane fly by. I was also outside all the time.

Cows, Ford tractors, and riding my pony, Dusty. And feeling safe and protected.

Gymnastics- It was my life from ages 5–12
Perfect scores- They were expected on everything I did
Church- My family went to church at least once a week
Junk food- It was pretty much all I ate
A comfortable loneliness- Never really had friends
Love- My parents loved me, and still do

Seems like a lot of people enjoyed the outdoors. ^_^

@queenie We lived outside. We left the house in the morning and didn’t go back in until nighttime.

@Adirondackwannabe That is the life. ; )

Playing Batman versus Joker with my friends (glorified version of “Tag”). I was the Joker once when a police car actually came to my house. (My mother was a high school teacher, and one of her star pupils drove his car across our lawn, probably while drunk.) My friends teased me that the cops were coming for me as the Joker.

A Red Ryder BB rifle with a compass in the stock.

I actually had one of those when I was 8 years old.

Rollerskating, swimming, playing in the sprinklers, bike riding, band practice, picking dandelions.

Chlorox jugs full of ice, olive loaf, ring bolonga, white bread. queenie’s comment reminded me of how we used to do our lunch outside during the Summer. When we were doing the hay we’d all start off with a jug of ice. As it melted we had cold water throughout the day. There were usually three of us on different tractors doing the different tasks. At lunch time my grandmother and mother would bring us sandwiches and we all get together and sit in the field and eat and talk. Sitting on the ground, eating together and then going back at it as soon as we finished eating. We thought we had the world by the tail. My grandfather and father loved olive loaf and ring bolonga. The lunch meat is probably why they’re no longer with us.

@noelleptc @Jude You want to talk about embarassing childhood stories? My best friend and I use to jump into my mother’s pool and pretend that we were mermaids. We swam with our legs crossed and everything… we had recently seen The Little Mermaid. I think we were about 10 or 11.

Special trees we climbed knowing every branch and foothold. Forgetting time and getting back late for tea.

LOL!

My grandparent’s lived two doors down. On the way home from school, I would always stop there for dinner (they ate around 4). My grandma would set me a little plate (bread plate) and I would have what they were having. She would also give me milk with a smidge of tea in a china cup. I would then proceed to tell her about “Louie”, my classmate and what awful thing he did that day, lol. We would always end our meal with a small bowl of raspberries with a bit of raspberry syrup over top and a scoop of ice cream.

Then, I would go home and have dinner with the family. Mom had no idea.

I was an itty-bitty thing.

@noelleptc I loved living a few doors down from them. I come from a big family (23 cousins) and had relatives over there all of the time. I got to play with my cous’ often!

Gathering outside with all the neighbor kids to play games like red rover, hopscotch, jump rope, marbles, easter eggs, statue, baseball, jacks, tag or hide-and-seek. Learning how to negotiate as we had to get a dozen kids to all agree on what we were going to play. Ha-ha.

@noelleptc I loved it!! My grandparents never locked the door during the day. When you would stop by and open the door to say hello, my grandma, who would be in another room would say “come on in, babe”. Not always knowing which grandkid it was. You always felt welcomed and loved.

I remember losing my shoe walking in a field after a rainstorm… the horses a family near us had, lightning bugs, playing tag in the cornfields, all of the neighborhood dogs having free range of the neighborhood, making ice-cream in our backyard, swinging on the tree swing and jumping out of the trees into our pond! Thank you for the trip down memory lane! I had an almost ideal childhood, and that helped me remember it. I have many memories of my childhood, most of them wonderful. I was very blessed. The couple that adopted me very much wanted kids, and I think that if I stopped to look at my life, I have been extremely spoiled! ;0)

Moving boxes… either packing or unpacking them. They make awesome toys as you can make so much out of them and a little imagination.

@GracieT I loved playing in the cornfields, too. And riding on the back of tractors, hay wagons and combines. Riding our bikes down gravel roads and the tree swing. Nothing beats a rural childhood.

I also miss Mrs. Skelton’s pickles. She had a big crock in her kitchen all summer with brine and pickling cukes. We would help ourselves to them all summer, even though they were barely in there long enough to be pickled. The were so good that I found a way to duplicate them. I put a quart of regular pickle brine in my fridge and throw a couple of pickling cukes from the garden in it. Leave them there for just a couple of days and then they are ready. Mmmm! Pikucles.

Sitting in the kitchen with my grandma, doing weird science experiments, traveling the world, and constant packing.

@john65pennington You’ll shoot yer eye out, kid!

books
climbing trees…or climbing trees to make a hammock out of a sheet to read books in the trees..
living in my swim suit all summer long
my wonderful grandmothers
bicycle rides around the neighborhood or down to Cyro’s Market for penny candy, or to the library or bookstore for yet more books.
lots of “let’s pretend” sort of games with the neighborhood kids

@Dr_Dredd One of my uncles and his friends had BB gun fights when they were small. One of them got hit in the eye. It didn’t cause him to lose the eye but it was a problem the rest of his life.

Fishing, swimming and waterskiing at the summer cottage, playing fast-pitch and whiffle ball all day long, gardening with my mom and biking the dirt trails of the Chicago Forest Preserves.

Making cookies on rainy days. Street football with the neighborhood. Backyard campouts telling scary stories and locating the constellations. Searching around in the desert finding lizards, pottery shards and old coins.

Saturday morning cartoons and Atari.

Fishing, climbing trees, horses and books- tons of books.

Pillows. It’s the only thing about me that always remains the same. I love pillows and soft things just as much as I did when I was little, so that being something intact from my childhood at this age now I think is good symbolism. I just don’t huggle pillows in front of people now…until I get to know them good. Even if I didn’t want to, it’s stronger than me, I can’t help it.

Climbing trees and Steve Austin in the Six Million Dollar Man.

@Adirondackwannabe Ouch.

Saving.

Books have always been and will always be a great part of my life. My friends and I were some of the nerds who always brought books outside at recess to read- we all also read through our textbooks as soon as we got them. I still read constantly, though, so I didn’t think to put that down as something I used to do!

The outdoors and daycares. I spend most of my childhood in these two places running around and making up stories to act out with my friends.

Barely any video games, any that existed were in their early models and weren’t super popular. They didn’t come into my life until about 5th grade.

Disney Classics like the Lion King, Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid rather than this shit they have now.

Porn, Dead Tree edition.

Going to the cinema with my mother or just watching movies at home, reading books (she taught me how, and she’d read me the difficult ones. Oh and when movies had subtitles and I couldn’t read fast enough I was five or something she’d read them for me).

Living inside an imaginary world, wondering what I really looked like (who can trust mirrors?), trying to figure out if I was really there or not (once, I burnt my hand with the iron), talking to myself a lot (I have no siblings and I never really liked kids my age)

I’d draw a lot, or write tiny stories and then read them to my mother.

Aaaand home cinema Fridays! At my grandmother’s, with homemade pizza.

What I remember most about my childhood is the yearly vacations
we would always take in our Dodge Dart car to Colorado from Texas.
We would camp out in a tent and is was so cold my brother and I
were put in the same sleeping bag with a tarp on top of us for warmth.
My mother used the same check list every year to make sure we had
everything and I still have that check list we used. My brother always
got sick and threw up in the car every year and now he is a doctor!
We fed the chip mucks by hand and watched our parents rainbow trout
fish in the river while we played in the water. That was a “golden time”
in my childhood and I still dream about it at times and wish I had it back.