Today’s topic was suggested by my friend whose last name happens to be Yard. I could write a whole post about her family, since I’ve known them since first grade, but she actually wanted me to write about all the time we spent outside in our yards as kids.
Most of my favorite activities were outside. Nearly all of my friends growing up lived on properties with good sized yards but trees as well. If you didn’t see us at ground level, we were probably up in one of them. One of our favorite games we called car spy. We would watch and listen for cars coming on my street and try to hide by the time they passed my house. Sometimes we adopted variations, where we would pay attention to the colors to solve a mystery or pretend we were in the Revolutionary War and they were the British. If we had a big crowd at a sleepover, we would play German spotlight. Whoever was “it” had to stand at base to count and everyone else went to hide. The person at base would slowly move the flashlight back and forth across the playing field, and if anyone got caught in the light, they were out. The goal was to make it back to base without being caught. This game worked well in most of our yards because there was plenty of space and things to hide behind. We also played it in our basements when the weather wasn’t great for being outside. Playing outside in our yards coming up with games and variations made me much more creative. We could turn anything into a fort (and don’t get me started on our indoor forts, because this post would double in length). The hammock was a boat. We built dams in the stream. We had to complete missions in the pool without Oscar (the vacuum) “seeing” us. When my parents would have people over, we would sit in a big tree by the driveway and shine flashlights around and see how long it took people to figure out where we were. In the last ten years, I know things have changed quite a bit. We had painfully slow dial-up internet and no cable until I was in high school, so I never spent much time on the computer or watching tv. My friends and I would take toys to each other’s houses instead of iPads like my sister’s friends do. Luckily, they still play outside too, but I know not everyone does now. I hope that by the time I have kids, no matter what technology is available to them, they will still enjoy playing outside because it was such an important part of my childhood.
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6/3/2015 12:08:57 pm
First, I love that you can view your cancer as the worst best thing! In many ways I feel the same way about the hardest, most difficult time in my life. I feel that way because of the wondrous ways I saw God work through that situation.
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AuthorI’m Karen. I was originally diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) in August 2004 when I was 10 years old. When I was working on my college and scholarship application essays two years ago, I wrote about my journey. Although it was a rough few years, it became such an influential part of my life that I can’t, and wouldn’t want to, imagine my life without having had cancer. I called it the worst best thing that ever happened to me. Archives
April 2022
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