This is the "participating" part. Blog Challenge #3 is mine. Here it is:I can tell we’re in mid-winter. Blah: the monotony of the cold days, windy nights, hours spent in the hockey rink, checking homework and the endless projects. Oh, and laundry doubles when the amount of coverage does! I’m suffering from a complete lack of motivation to much of anything creative or contribute to anything but my waistline.
Where do you go when you know you have to go somewhere but don’t have the time, energy or inclination to actually leave the house?
Where do you go when you know you have to go somewhere but don’t have the time, energy or inclination to actually leave the house?
I find, lately, that I take my mental holidays not so much to a place but a time: to my youth. Especially the summers of my youth (I am truly chilled to the bone, right now!)
Those days when no one relied on me for anything but … well, no one relied on me to be anything but a kid. I was a bit of a dweeb – as my children would call children like me. I enjoyed reading very large books, completing jigsaw puzzles, swimming and tennis, needlepoint and general quiet and calm.
I listened to huge amounts of Neil Diamond, Beach Boys and Eagles; Simon & Garfunkle, James Taylor and Carly Simon, because that was the music my Dad enjoyed – generally in the car – out of the earshot of my mother who did not approve of such things. Goodness knows, in her world there were only two kinds of music: show tunes and church music. I’ll always remember coming back from the Ice Capades show when we lived in Cleveland and having to stop for something. My dad flipped on the radio and Neil Diamond “Song Sung Blue” came on. Dad was in heaven. I was amazed such music existed. We had to flip it off before it ended because mum came back to the car, but oh, the decadence of it all … and to share a secret with my Dad - wow!
I think of the hours spent at our pool in the back yard at our house in Toronto, the great apparatus at Victoria Park in Truro – especially the huge round iron thing with it’s huge chain holding it all together we could swing on (of course, all the fun things found in the park then are now banned) and the thrill of running free among 400 acres - unsupervised for hours, rolling down the massive hills at Winston Churchill Park (what were we thinking?), riding horses at the stables when we lived in Chicago (Palantine, actually), days in Cape Breton at the pool or beach and carrying Dad’s golf clubs at the Keltic Lodge golf course, climbing Papa’s tree and eating the fresh cherries and getting scratched up picking raspberries from the bushes; playing tennis from dawn until dusk with anyone who would challenge me – either at the BSS or Winston Churchill courts and playing doubles with the “old” ladies in Mrs. Johnson’s back yard court. Those old ladies were younger than I am now.
Those days when no one relied on me for anything but … well, no one relied on me to be anything but a kid. I was a bit of a dweeb – as my children would call children like me. I enjoyed reading very large books, completing jigsaw puzzles, swimming and tennis, needlepoint and general quiet and calm.
I listened to huge amounts of Neil Diamond, Beach Boys and Eagles; Simon & Garfunkle, James Taylor and Carly Simon, because that was the music my Dad enjoyed – generally in the car – out of the earshot of my mother who did not approve of such things. Goodness knows, in her world there were only two kinds of music: show tunes and church music. I’ll always remember coming back from the Ice Capades show when we lived in Cleveland and having to stop for something. My dad flipped on the radio and Neil Diamond “Song Sung Blue” came on. Dad was in heaven. I was amazed such music existed. We had to flip it off before it ended because mum came back to the car, but oh, the decadence of it all … and to share a secret with my Dad - wow!
I think of the hours spent at our pool in the back yard at our house in Toronto, the great apparatus at Victoria Park in Truro – especially the huge round iron thing with it’s huge chain holding it all together we could swing on (of course, all the fun things found in the park then are now banned) and the thrill of running free among 400 acres - unsupervised for hours, rolling down the massive hills at Winston Churchill Park (what were we thinking?), riding horses at the stables when we lived in Chicago (Palantine, actually), days in Cape Breton at the pool or beach and carrying Dad’s golf clubs at the Keltic Lodge golf course, climbing Papa’s tree and eating the fresh cherries and getting scratched up picking raspberries from the bushes; playing tennis from dawn until dusk with anyone who would challenge me – either at the BSS or Winston Churchill courts and playing doubles with the “old” ladies in Mrs. Johnson’s back yard court. Those old ladies were younger than I am now.
I enjoy visiting my youth: the whole sense of time was different.
Certainly it is far easier to find the crappy and negative memories of my youth, but I do far prefer to visit the happy, sunny days of those summers when I was a young, happy dweeb!
1 comment:
We should all heed your words and remember the happy times of our youth as you have done! It makes for a peaceful mental holiday!
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