Memories of Playing Games and Spending Time with Grandma

The games people played, I mean the ones when I was young. There was hop scotch, I've forgotten what the thing we tossed was called. Anyway,  we just used a piece of broken glass and stick to draw the lines. There wasn't much grass in the yards then.  That was before lawn mowers.  We just swept most of the yard. That also made it better for playing marbles. That was very popular, even with the grown men on a Sunday afternoon. We could play "jacks", if we could find 10 small rocks and a little rubber ball. Usually you could find a rope somewhere around the barn to play jump rope. Sometimes several of us would jump at the same time, if the rope was long enough.

I lived only a few yards from the one room school where I went through 3rd grade. One game that all of us liked to play was throwing a ball over the building, yelling "Andy over, the pigs in the clover, can't get him out 'til the ball goes over". I don't remember what the goal was, but then we would change sides.

I remember that there was always noise and laughter on that play ground. Even though it was just a stones throw away from our house once in a while mother would let me take my lunch, that consisted of a biscuit with "cow" butter and home made jelly, packed in a lard bucket.   Boy I felt like "big stuff".

My cousin and I spent so much time with our grandma.  She let us make a little more mess than our moms would.  We played Paper People, cutting pictures out of Sears and Roebucks' catalog.  No store bought paper dolls but we enjoyed ourselves.  We had furniture and everything. The only restrictions were we had to put all of our mess under the bed when we were finished.

I loved spending nights at grandmas.  She had a three room house but only used two of them.  The third was kept neat and clean in case she had company. The "front" room was for sleeping and sitting. She slept in the big bed.  There was another small bed that my grandpa had named "the dog bed".  I don't know why because they never had a dog. The mattress, if you could call it that, was made of shredded corn shucks.  My cousin slept with grandma and I got the dog bed. The walls were papered with newspapers.  In the evening we would play a game by trying to guess what each other was looking at. She lived just across the road from us.  She was my dads mother. Some nights she would tell ghost stories then send me home in the dark.  It was just a few steps, but it seemed like a long way.  I was always so scared. My grandpa, everybody called him Uncle Bud Seacrist, died when I was three.

I think it was April 1941, I stayed home from school because of a tooth ache.  I was twelve.  I spent the day with grandma and read to her. The next day when I came home, was so sad to learn that she had had a stroke and passed away the next day. That was one tooth ache I have always been thankful for. She has such a special place in my memory.

So much for memories of old times.  One thing for sure, the young people today don't know what they are missing.