My neighbor’s grandkid and I played with a hay baler. Got all in the machinery and everything, turned on! We’re lucky we’re not amputees or dead.

Re: Parking Spots…
…and driving in circles past the “it ain’t *that* nice” car annoyingly parked across multiple spots.

I created a secret hideout in the attic crawlspace replete with dozens of candles tucked into the insulation.

Routinely went ‘exploring’ with no backup and no word to anyone as to my plans (and be told no? bah!). lessee there was: the water moccassin swamp (to collect tennis balls, golf balls and tadpoles), the abandoned house (err condemned house abandoned except for the vagrants), the construction site where I used the awesomely smooth-sided foundation excavation to dig out (I kid you not) a long, deep, three-roomed burrow–having recently been enamored of Watership Down. There was a quicksand incident and a riptide incident, too…on which I’m fuzzier save that I survived even if various personal effects did not.

For a season, would cut through the green belt that backed up on the sole-surviving horse farm in our disturbian neighborhood. A jumprope and stump later away I’d ride…wheee! As often as not until the beleaguered owner would come shrieking from the house. Killjoy.*
As an adult owner of a horse farm, I have tried without success to find and offer abject apology to this poor woman…I also make a point of disturbian youth horse-mania outreach…(and a facility layout not conducive to such hijinks).

F-o’dear, I could go on and on…Oddly, it wasn’t until I was a grown-up, taking ‘sensible precautions’ that I started experiencing the myriad ways one’s body could bend, fold, spindle and mutilate…Thanks for the memories, VA!

Oh jeez. Tons of stuff like this. Sledding down a steep hill backwards into a rock-filled dry streambed. Jumping horses while riding bareback. Riding my bike down steep inclines sans hands – look ma, no hands. Jumping the same bike (and this was a three-speed, not a stinkin’ mountain bike!) over rock-filled four to five foot ditches. Clocked myself once doing that once while riding alone and I have no idea how long I was lying in that ditch! And obviously, no helmets for any of this; even if they had been commonly used in those days, I wouldn’t have been caught dead – and I didn’t even consider myself a “tomboy”! I liked to play with the Barbies a lot, too. Well balanced childhood, LOL! We were just a little wild is all. (Though nothing compared to my country cousins – now they were WILD. Chasing us with snakes, swimming in snapper-turtle filled ponds. Oh, and our buddies with the hippie parents – we went on a family outing with them up to Maine and rode in the back of a VW van with hole-ridden floorboards; one kid had his head down that hole face-to-face with the highway for half the trip – just for kicks.) And frankly, it was pretty great. I would never survive as a child today with all the helicoptering and hovering and safety equipment and stuff. I wouldn’t be able to tolerate it!

Good question, Virgo Avenger – and hard to pin it down though it has to have been a mixture of generational and societal. I was (am) one of the very first waves of “Gen X” – right on the tail of the Boomers, and my childhood took place in the Seventies which, for my money, was definitely the most single chaotic, disorienting decade of the 20th Century. I really feel like we had to learn to deal back then – to just deal, with life’s ups and downs, with all kinds of matters. With reality, basically. My parents were (are) both members of the “Silent Generation,” the one between the “Greatest” and the “Boomers” – though my dad is a WWII/Korean war vet (he quit high school to go to WWII. My parents’ values are hugely focused on self-sufficiency, probably because that’s how they had to grow up. (Both my parents’ childhoods were impacted by the Depression though in very different ways.) And they, and I have to assume most parents of my peers, had no interest in coddling. My favorite neighbors were a Korean doctor (escaped out of post-war North Korea – now that’s tough) and his no BS Irish-American wife and their kids, who could go lap-for-lap with me. Sports, school, you name it – mental and physical toughness were biggies and so was outright competitiveness, the “us v. Soviets” thing being in full swing and making everything seem like a clash of the titans-level sporting event. Gentle, quieter kids like my younger sister did not have an easy time of it back then, so it wasn’t all that golden of a time for many. Personally, it really suited me (pretty much all Aquarius and Capricorn with a competition-loving Leo rising) and again, I was not even considered a tomboy, it was all just for fun and sport. Anywho, it is interesting, the interplay and ripple effects of generations; I’ve done a lot of reading on it and there are four specific generational cycles that have repeated throughout history. The cycle I’m from is considered the self-sufficient, highly independent type one, which I can definitely see being the case.

I was 4 to 14 in the fifties, and I can tell you we had incredible independence even though my parents were considered much more protective than most. My Sag sister didn’t take advantage of it but I did, fully! I used to go off on my own on my bike, or walking with my dog, for hours.

We had a holiday home by the sea almost two miles from the beach, and my sister and I would set off there early: Ma (or both of them if Dad was down) didn’t come find us til much later with their friends (ie often when the pubs were shut after lunch!). I’d go rock-climbing and caving… and swim out as far as I could go. We’d chat to other families, and make odd friends.

Down there (in Devon) I’d go riding with this mad family who had a farm down in the valley – a filthy place with chickens and ponies wandering into the kitchen… We’d play cowboys and indians on the cliffs, which were hundreds of feet high and sheer, riding at full tilt after each other, whooping with scarves waving , and just turning the ponies a few feet from the edge… I can’t start to tell you all the mad things I’d do. Often too I’d be down there staying at my grandparents, and I’d go off for hours on my own, the only injunctions to be back at a certain time, and ‘not to talk to any strange men’.

Kids had almost total freedom in those days, and for a long time after – the coddling didn’t really start til the 80s. I used to go up to London (25 miles away) on the train, with a friend or two, form when I was about 12, and went to school on my own (by bus) from about 9, and form 11 by train.

I remember when we lived in France in the 1980s our friends would come over with their kids – and the village kids would pour scorn on how they weren’t allowed to do anything (like climb ladders and trees, play in empty ruined houses, go off picnicking up the mountain etc etc). In fact they weren’t allowed out of their parents’ sight… But even I was astonished by the French insouciance – all the village children under 12 were just chucked out in the morning, called for lunch, chucked out again after lunch, and called for supper, and the older ones were in charge of the tinies (3yr olds and up). There was a little gang of boys aged 4-6 who would race their toy trucks down the village street – a very long steep hill! None of them ever came to any harm…

I wonder if having kids later and later was something to do with it, or the hysteria of the media about the occasional murder etc, or fear of the increasingly powerful ‘social workers’ who can now whisk away your kid at will? And where did this terrible fear of ‘injury’ come from? We were always having to be patched up…

My neighbor’s grandkid and I played with a hay baler. Got all in the machinery and everything, turned on! We’re lucky we’re not amputees or dead.