School starts next week, officially ending summer. I'm afraid for the end of summer, not as much for myself, although I dread even the thought of winter, but for all the children I see who never had a real summer vacation.
Kids now seldom get to roam through woods and fields unsupervised. Many don't have a good climbing tree close at hand.
One of our favorite past times was to go to the school playground and play on the tower. I don't know or care what the real name was but it was a tall pole, taller than a house with chains hanging down all around from a disk at the top. The chains had two handles one above the other at the bottom. The purpose was to hang onto the handles, run around the pole, and swing. What we did was take turns being the “flyer”. Everyone would wind the chains around the pole except the flyer. The others would pass under that chain so that it stayed on top of the wound up chains. Then everyone would start running in a circle. The result would pick up the outside person and send them in a parallel orbit about 25 feet in the air. Of course, you held on with everything you had, to avoid being launched like a frisbee.
Funny, I never heard of anyone getting launched but eventually the tower was taken out because of safety fears. The teeter-totters, merry-go-round, and all the other really fun equipment were also taken out. Now the playgrounds are surfaced and we hear all the time of kids getting hurt. When they were dirt, you expected to get hurt and to be tough.
We all went bare-foot in the summer and had feet like shoe-leather. We rode bikes bare-foot without helmets. That meant that often we had very skinned toes but, that was just the way it was.
We swam in creeks with no life-guard. The only “sun block” was a tree. Turning bright red and peeling was to be expected.
Now kids play much safer games and I worry. When do they really have summer fun?
