The games we play

My brothers Jimmy, Richard and Leslie were always making something for use to play with. One day they build stilts out of the lumber that was left over from framing the house. My brothers could walk on them I was never any good at it I would just fall and skin my knees.
We used to find turtles and mark their back with paint and have turtle races.
We play cowboys and Indians. I used pokeberry one time to paint my face and come to find out, it did not wash off very easy. After we decided who was going to be the cowboys and who was the Indians then we would chase each other thru the wood and hills.
We had a gunny sack swing. You may wonder what that is, it is burlap sack filled with straw or leaves, and sometime we would fill it with old clothes. We might even have an old tire for a swing.
We would play tree top tag. We would go to a grove of young oak trees, climb to the top of the tree and get that tree a swaying back in forth till you could reach the other tree top and cross over to it and of course our neighbors would be there along with us to play.
Sometimes the boys would take us when they were going for a walk and we would go through some old home site that had been abandoned. We would find the old green glass jars they used for canning and maybe some tools laying around. We might have walked a mile or two, to these places. Never did anyone ever get a broken bone. We might have got stung by wasps or got cut by broken glass or step on a nail and scraped by barbed wire, but nothing serious.
We saw a lot of snakes, not one us of ever got bitten. We knew to side step or run if we saw one. I guess we had some common sense build in us.
Sometime the neighbors would come down and go swimming with us or play cowboys an Indians; we had a good time with them. We went to Everton school we rode the same school bus. They were the same age that we were.
Our favorite place to go in the summer was the swimming hole, we spend hours their cooling off.
This place holds a lot of good memories and stories.


By Vivian Foote
July 26, 2011