Last night I was at my mom's for dinner (a yummy dish that we call "summer spaghetti"). After dinner, we went to a local ice cream stand for desssert, Stoddard's, a summer treat in these parts, where one can get delicious frozen custard and of course, ice cream. It was a classic warm summer night in July, the kind I remember from my childhood. After we came home, I sat out on the porch of my mom's house to visit with two local cats who are in desperate need of human attention and affection, Herman, a lovely brown tabby cat who was abandoned by his owner when his house was foreclosed on and he was forced to move out and leave, and Satine, a beautiful sleek black cat who I suspect was dumped in the neighborhood by previous owners hoping that someone might adopt him. Satine is fed by my mom's next door neighbor and I suspect that the neighbor next to them, a recently widowed older man, is feeding Herman. But they both desperately long for human attention and I, of course, am an old softy when it comes to cats, so of course, if I am sitting on my mom's porch, they both come running because they know they'll get petted and talked to and will get ample affection and attention from me. While I was petting the cats, I happened to notice that it was oddly silent in my mom's neighborhood for a balmy summer night. Where were the sounds of kids playing, of human activity that should be taking place on just such a night as this, I thought? I remember how, during my childhood, our street rang out with the sounds of kids playing on a warm summer night. We were usually busy riding bikes, playing games like flashlight tag or kick-the-can or doing something else, but we were always outdoors running around doing things on summer nights. We were fortunate to live on a street with many young families who had lots of kids, so there were 60+ kids with whom to play on our street, mostly within my age range. Games of kick-the-can and other games were epic, because they usually involved a lot of kids from the neighborhood. You could always hear the sounds of kids laughing, talking, yelling, our bikes whizzing up and down the street or engaged in some epic neighborhood game or climbing someone's tree in their yard. The neighborhood moms sat on lawn chairs in someone's yard drinking iced tea and talking to each other, probably grateful to be able to talk to fellow adults and talk some badly needed "grown-up talk" while watching us to make sure we didn't do anything stupid. There is a nearby field a few blocks away that had, at one time, been an old school playground that became the local baseball diamond for our neighborhood Little League team to play ball. You could hear them several blocks away during games, "'Ey, batter, batter, batter, SWING!" Sometimes we'd walk down there to watch the neighborhood boys play ball and to cheer them on. We also had a big woods catter-corner to our house where kids played, built forts, sledded on a hill in a clearing in winter and on rare occasion, ice skated on a small pond that would sometimes appear at the bottom of the hill from heavy rains that froze or snow that melted and then froze again to form the pond.
Summer nights rang out with the sounds of playing kids on our street, and when it was time for everyone to come inside, each parent had his or her unique signal to call the kids indoors, ours being an antique cow bell rung by our mom, so all of those rung out into the night as play ended for the day and we all went inside to take a bath and wash off the day's accumulated dirt as well as to cool down and deal with itchy mosquito bites. Summer was a magical time on our street. Everyone played outdoors all day long and into the night until parents called kids home. We played hard and scraped elbows and skinned knees and mosquito bites scratched until they bled were common things we coped with as a part of all the playing we did back then. Parents now don't seem to let kids be kids and let them play, roam, ride bikes and do the things we did at their ages. Is it any wonder that childhood obesity rates are soaring? Kids spend all day indoors in front of their computer screens or playing video games or other indoor and sedentary activities. They don't go out and play hard like we did back then. It seems rather sad to sit on my mom's front porch and listen to the silence on a summer night when the street should be filled with the sounds of kids playing. The old field nearby where the boys played baseball is silent, too, absent of kids out using it on a summer day. It's now a city park thanks to the recent threat of a housing development being built there, so it will be preserved in perpetuity, but I seldom see kids playing there, if ever. Once in a great while, I'll see a soccer game going on there, but most of the time, it's quiet, unused. It's sad that a park we fought so hard to get created isn't used as much as it should be, but at least it will be there for future generations to enjoy, if kids ever again decide to go outside and play hard like we did all four seasons of the year. I just hate to sit on a front porch on a summer night and hear the silence that marks the absence of children at play like they once were when I was growing up.
Last night I was at my mom's for dinner (a yummy dish that we call "summer spaghetti"). After dinner, we went to a local ice cream stand for desssert, Stoddard's, a summer treat in these parts, where one can get delicious frozen custard and of course, ice cream. It was a classic warm summer night in July, the kind I remember from my childhood. After we came home, I sat out on the porch of my mom's house to visit with two local cats who are in desperate need of human attention and affection, Herman, a lovely brown tabby cat who was abandoned by his owner when his house was foreclosed on and he was forced to move out and leave, and Satine, a beautiful sleek black cat who I suspect was dumped in the neighborhood by previous owners hoping that someone might adopt him. Satine is fed by my mom's next door neighbor and I suspect that the neighbor next to them, a recently widowed older man, is feeding Herman. But they both desperately long for human attention and I, of course, am an old softy when it comes to cats, so of course, if I am sitting on my mom's porch, they both come running because they know they'll get petted and talked to and will get ample affection and attention from me. While I was petting the cats, I happened to notice that it was oddly silent in my mom's neighborhood for a balmy summer night. Where were the sounds of kids playing, of human activity that should be taking place on just such a night as this, I thought? I remember how, during my childhood, our street rang out with the sounds of kids playing on a warm summer night. We were usually busy riding bikes, playing games like flashlight tag or kick-the-can or doing something else, but we were always outdoors running around doing things on summer nights. We were fortunate to live on a street with many young families who had lots of kids, so there were 60+ kids with whom to play on our street, mostly within my age range. Games of kick-the-can and other games were epic, because they usually involved a lot of kids from the neighborhood. You could always hear the sounds of kids laughing, talking, yelling, our bikes whizzing up and down the street or engaged in some epic neighborhood game or climbing someone's tree in their yard. The neighborhood moms sat on lawn chairs in someone's yard drinking iced tea and talking to each other, probably grateful to be able to talk to fellow adults and talk some badly needed "grown-up talk" while watching us to make sure we didn't do anything stupid. There is a nearby field a few blocks away that had, at one time, been an old school playground that became the local baseball diamond for our neighborhood Little League team to play ball. You could hear them several blocks away during games, "'Ey, batter, batter, batter, SWING!" Sometimes we'd walk down there to watch the neighborhood boys play ball and to cheer them on. We also had a big woods catter-corner to our house where kids played, built forts, sledded on a hill in a clearing in winter and on rare occasion, ice skated on a small pond that would sometimes appear at the bottom of the hill from heavy rains that froze or snow that melted and then froze again to form the pond.
Summer nights rang out with the sounds of playing kids on our street, and when it was time for everyone to come inside, each parent had his or her unique signal to call the kids indoors, ours being an antique cow bell rung by our mom, so all of those rung out into the night as play ended for the day and we all went inside to take a bath and wash off the day's accumulated dirt as well as to cool down and deal with itchy mosquito bites. Summer was a magical time on our street. Everyone played outdoors all day long and into the night until parents called kids home. We played hard and scraped elbows and skinned knees and mosquito bites scratched until they bled were common things we coped with as a part of all the playing we did back then. Parents now don't seem to let kids be kids and let them play, roam, ride bikes and do the things we did at their ages. Is it any wonder that childhood obesity rates are soaring? Kids spend all day indoors in front of their computer screens or playing video games or other indoor and sedentary activities. They don't go out and play hard like we did back then. It seems rather sad to sit on my mom's front porch and listen to the silence on a summer night when the street should be filled with the sounds of kids playing. The old field nearby where the boys played baseball is silent, too, absent of kids out using it on a summer day. It's now a city park thanks to the recent threat of a housing development being built there, so it will be preserved in perpetuity, but I seldom see kids playing there, if ever. Once in a great while, I'll see a soccer game going on there, but most of the time, it's quiet, unused. It's sad that a park we fought so hard to get created isn't used as much as it should be, but at least it will be there for future generations to enjoy, if kids ever again decide to go outside and play hard like we did all four seasons of the year. I just hate to sit on a front porch on a summer night and hear the silence that marks the absence of children at play like they once were when I was growing up.
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