First, some background. I grew up in a village in the middle of the midwest with cold winters and hot summers. The village was small enough that everyone knew everyone else and there were many families with the same surname. And, many of those families were related to me ranging from first cousins to fourth cousins twice removed of my father. So, we all knew each other and their lineage. I had grandparents, uncles and aunts from both sides, and cousins galore. It was a time when people had large families. Two families in our church had twelve children. I digress.
Because of the environment, we played different games some regulation and others invented by one of us. We played softball in the road since there wasn't very much traffic and the cars traveled slowly knowing there were children playing in the street. Another made up game was running beside the slowest driver in town to see who could run faster than he drove. Alley oop was a game where one person stood on one side of a small building and threw something over the roof to another person standing on the other side. When you threw, you yelled alley oop and the other person would try to catch what was thrown. Of course, some strange things were thrown that you really wouldn't want to catch and you didn't know what was coming until it was upon you sometimes literally.
Another game involved a sharp knife in close proximity to hands and arms called mumbly peg. This game involved throwing a knife from a stationary position on the back of your hand and trying to get it stuck in the ground for points. Then it would progress up the arm to the shoulder and the winning point was off the top of the head. I wouldn't recommend this game although none of us ever got cut.
Climbing trees and jumping off of low branches was fun but again I wouldn't recomment this for children. And then, there was climbing trees to see who could get the highest. Fortunately, Mom didn't know about this game because we were climbing cottonwood trees which get very tall and it would have made her very nervous.
We had roller derbies before we knew there was such a thing. In the summer, we went all over town on our rollerskates. Not the shoe skates that we know now but the ones that clamped on your shoes that parents hated because they ruined the shoes. We loved it and I got to be very fast but never learned to skate backwards even though I really tried and had the bruises to prove it. I couldn't spin either. Maybe, I can still learn.
Reading tombstones and seeing who could find the oldest one(it was an old cemetery) or which person was the longest lived was another game, albeit a morbid one, that we played. We would walk through always ending where our grandparents were buried. There was a small white cement mausoleum close to where our grandparents were buried. We were always fascinated by the mausoleum but we were never brave enough to even go near it. It was given a wide berth even though we were quite comfortable walking in the cemetery.
Mother always told never to drink any water from the water spigots out there and we didn't to make her happy. She might ask us about that and we didn't want to lie. She didn't mention the drainage ditch on the outskirts of town. We were young and stupid but was didn't get sick or break anything when we were doing stupid stuff. We got hurt when we were doing normal everyday things.
We had fun but we never broke anything or damaged the neighbors property. And, outside was definitely our favorite game.
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