It's nice days like these that have me reminiscing on my childhood years. I lived outside when I was a kid. I drank out of the hose, climbed the one tree that the mean old neighbors didn't want us to, and even got dragged around by my Lab/Shephard mix of a dog as he pursued a squirrel. Like I said, I lived. And I even have a scar on my forehead to prove it. Turns out climbing and falling off a cinder block wall the day before the family move isn't the best thing to do. But I was a little adventurer.
When we moved, I think my mother breathed a sigh of relief when we ended up having kids next door that were our same ages. And their mom and mine had the same philophosy: Shove 'em outside and don't let them in till dinnertime. Don't worry, we didn't have to go pee in the bushes, she would let us in, but we rarely watched that much T.V. growing up. Instead we would play baseball, kickball, freeze tag, cereal tag, toilet tag, tunnel tag, seriously any form of tag known to man, in the field behind our houses. We packed little picnic lunches and would ride our bikes down to the park and climb on top of the playground equipment, because we were legit like that. We had lemonade stands that would go toward funding our club, The Boys and Girls Club. Such an original title, I know. And we would call each others houses pretending to order pizza. And we would make hopscotches that would stretch all the way around the block. We would have epic water fights that included 4 different houses. We would go "snorkeling" in our plastic kiddy pool on the driveway. We would wash the cars. We made squirrel traps. We found a sparkely rock and made it our club mascot. We would have the most epic Easter Egg hunts months after Easter was gone. To this day I'm sure there are some in my backyard. We played in the rainstorms till we were soaked, and we did cool tricks with our bikes. Don't tell the parents, but we would ditch our helmets once we were out of view because we were "cool", with our shirts tucked into our waist high shorts, our bangs and bowlcuts. And we would have contests of all kinds; Skip-It, Bop-It, Jump roping, Bike tricks, who could find the coolest rock....we played. We had fun. We used our imagination. We were kids.
And it was great, those springs and summers when we didn't have a care in the world except for the adventures we were going to go on that day. We did stupid things. But they were awesome. Sometimes I think that we underestimate how much just being a kid is important. As we grow up into adulthood, we can forget about the things in our lives that really matter and the joys that come from it. We forget how to live and to find that joy. How do we view the world? How easily we forget the tender mercies in our lives. President Gordon B. Hinckley said, "Life is to be enjoyed, not endured". Now I'm not saying that we all need to start looking for the sparkley rocks in the flower bed or play a mean game of "Find the Easter Eggs", but we do need to find things that bring us that simple joy. As we do, we may find ourselves a little bit more heading in the right direction.
