My Childhood: Playing In The Back Yard

The garden was a great place to play. Behind the plants was a maze of pathways which were great for hide-and-seek or find-the-buried-treasure. My neighborhood friends and I spent many happy hours behind those gardens!

Another thing that made the garden great was the insects. Thousand upon thousands of insects visited dad’s garden every day. Butterflies, wasps, honey bees, bumble bees, and, most fascinating of all to a young boy, June bugs. June bugs were especially great if, you stick a pin through their bodies, tied a string to the pin, and let them fly around while holding onto the other end of the string.

I remember making many kill jars, and spending hours upon hours each day attempting to catch these insects with my butterfly net. Anything I caught would be stuffed into the kill jar. After it died, it would be added to my insect collection.

I eventually had quite a large insect collection, but was frustrated because of its tendency to decay. I eventually cast a few dozen insects in plastic, which worked fine but was a whole lot of effort. I still have two of these castings. The others have disappeared over the years. The insect collection decayed and fell apart well before junior high. This impermanence disgusted me, and I lost interest in bug collecting.

During a certain time of the year, right after the spring rains, our garden became a great place for frog hunts. You see, the next door neighbors had a fish pond, in which the frogs laid their eggs. Shortly thereafter, the pond would become filled with tadpoles. We children must have spent hours watching these tadpoles swim about. They were fascinating.

Eventually the tadpoles changed into frogs. Naturally, some of the frogs were attracted to our garden, as it was the best garden in the neighborhood, full of nice, tasty bugs. Whenever I found one, I’d catch it, and bring it into the house to show mom. I knew she hated frogs, so it was great fun to watch her as she told me to get rid of the thing.

Perhaps my favorite place was a depression directly behind the house, just large enough for a mud hole. During the summer months, I used to love to turn on the hose and fill this hole with water. Then I’d grab my toy solders, jump in, and pretend I was a great general. The mock battles would continue for hours upon hours.

Sometimes, when I was in a quieter mood, I’d just sit my the mud hole and watch the animals. Wasps would slowly circle, then land near the edge of the water. They’d carefully walk up to the mud, and dig into it’s surface. The wasp would use it’s mandibles to mold some mud into a little ball, which it would then carry up to a nest it was building in the eves of our roof.

One day I noticed the wasps nest was empty, so I knocked it down and added it to my collection. I kept it for many years (it was in my Hillside science fair entry), but eventually it was misplaced or thrown away.

We also had a jungle gym and swing set, which was great fun. I’d spend hours swinging, climbing and jumping. This jungle gym had a small fort attached, which was great for playing games like Swiss Family Robinson. I used to love to attach a large piece of plywood to this fort, for use as a slide.