Throwback Thursday

It's a lovely day - spring is really doing its thing and all the flowers are coming out and it's getting warmer - hell next week looks like we'll be in full blown summer weather.

This reminds me of summer days the several years we lived on Somerled Ave. in Montreal. There was a park down the road, and the blocks were all residential, with big trees and front yards as well as backyards and I had friends across the street, down one road, and up the other.

Most summer days we would all hang out together, sometimes at the park, sometimes in various of each other's yards. The rules were, no going in anyone's house without going back home to ask permission and going back at lunch time and then at supper - whoever's place we were playing near, their mother would call their kid in for lunch and that would be our cue to go home for ours. Somehow we managed all this without a single cell phone!

We had a long driveway that slopped down to our garage, which wasn't attached to the house. It was attached to the garage for the house next door, so it was quite a wide expanse of asphalt and even longer than it was wide and obviously there were no cars along it. I can remember playing Mother May I and Red Light, Green Light along the driveway. I can remember the slope of the hill and the stairs up to the backyard between the garage and the house, but I have no memory of what color the garage door was. I do know we didn't have a car, so I'm not sure what all we kept in the garage.

Once I learned how to ride a bicycle (my father didn't believe in training wheels and spent one weekend running along behind me with his hand on the bottom of the seat, steadying me. He let go when I got too fast and called out after I'd successfully done it on my own for a minute or so. I remember being just fine until I realized he wasn't still holding on, then I panicked and crashed into a tree.) Anyway... once I learned how to ride a bicycle, I spent lots of time in the summer doing that, too.

I know one summer the kids across the street got the chicken pox and one by one the rest of us did too. I was second, coming down with it a few days after the kids across the street, so I could play with them and anyone else who had it while the kids who got it last had a smaller and smaller group of un-chicken-poxed to play with. I don't know why our parents bothered trying to keep any of us from getting it, we were around each other enough that it was a losing battle on their part.

We were at that house from mid-first grade through fourth grade and it was the longest we were at any one place until my folks bought a house when I was 14 or so. Summers at other places were different, but each year at Somerled, the summer days pretty much followed the same pattern.

I'll tell the story of Shercan the Saint Bernard who lived next door some other time... ;)

Sean
smut fixes everything