Modern Hill Woman

The average kid aged 8 to 10 spends six hours a day in front of a screen for entertainment.

When I was a kid, we probably weren’t even in the house six hours a day, excluding sleeping time. We roamed the woods, the fields, the yard and the gravel road. It was a safer world then, and I guess mom didn’t worry much about us getting kidnapped since there was such a gang of us. She must not have worried about us getting snake bit, drowned, run over, or lost either.

When you have a dozen kids, you can’t exactly be a “helicopter mom”, constantly hovering about. Just keeping the laundry done up with a wringer washer and a clothesline was close to a full-time job. Add to that growing nearly all your own food, milking a cow twice a day to turn into all your dairy products, raising pigs for meat, and chickens for meat and eggs; see you at dusk, kids.

We played a lot down on the pond bank. We’d look for the mud chimneys made by crawdaddies and capture and imprison them in shallow water-filled pools with high walls. There was no chance of escape until we were done playing with them. Their claws didn’t hurt much when they grabbed you.

There was a big poke berry bush by the pond. We were allowed to play with the berries, even though mom always told us they were poison. I guess she thought we weren’t dumb enough to eat them. The juice was a pretty purple color, but if you got it on your hands, they would stay stained for days.

My sister, Marylin, and I made dozens of mud pies on that pond bank, sometimes filling them with poke berries. My nephew, Mike, would occasionally eat the mud pies we made, but we didn’t serve him the ones with poke berries, because we didn’t want to kill him. We never understood why he liked to eat dirt. Side note, his brother, Steve used to eat dog food when he was little. They must have had a vitamin deficiency.

Mike eventually outgrew his love of mud pies, at least as far as I know.