Makenna bought be a subscription to Story Worth for Mother's day. It's a site where they send you a prompt and you answer as much as you want. I've decided that I would copy and share my posts here, in case the printed version doesn't work out. Eventually I get to add pictures, but I'll need to gather them from my mom for the childhood questions.
Here's the first prompt: What games or toys did you enjoy most when you were young?
The earliest memory I have of playing anything was in New York when I was four. My dad had some refrigerator and hanging clothes boxes from our recent move and made Tom and I a little house. We played in that house a lot! I can still remember the way the door swung and the little windows on the sides.
The best games I played always included my older brother, Tom. We played everything from Cowboys & Indians to a timed game called Perfection. I learned how to run fast because of Tom and so games of tag between the two of us took a long time! Most of our time was spent outside in the woods. We would build forts, creating little houses for ourselves in the nooks and crannies that grown-ups couldn’t access. We had our own little neighborhood in the woods behind the little blue house in Gig Harbor. If those trees were still there, I could probably walk straight to my hide-out. Tom’s was harder for me to find; he had to be in it, with his brightly colored t-shirt, for me to find it. He was really good at creating a space that was hard to find. On the rare occasion that it would snow in the harbor, my dad would go out with us and build us each a snow fort so we could hide behind them and have massive snow ball fights. He would help whichever one of us was losing, usually me.
The little blue house had a covered back porch, so we would play there when it was raining too hard to be completely outside. We had some fake musical instruments out there and would pretend, with our friends, to be in a band. Tom always played the guitar and I sang. That porch had it's own table and chairs, which my mom still has for the little kids to color at. We would sit out there and draw, color, paint, play with playdough, etc. It was great because any mess could just be rinsed into the yard.
Our mom thought she would create a garden on the side of the little blue house; it was actually a really large space. But it never happened. So, Tom and I used the garden area to create a town for our matchbox cars. We made buildings, roads, bridges, and tunnels with the dirt, sticks and rocks. We could never make the river work, the water kept soaking in. It was very frustrating.
When we would visit our grandmother in Lompoc, we would sneak into the shed and get out her games. She had a very eclectic collection - Perfection, Whirlybirds, and Tinker Toys to name a few. Oodles of puzzles of all sizes, coloring books and stickers. She had boxes and boxes of crayons because they came in "pretty tins". Plus, she kept a lot of interesting things in that shed, it was like finding new treasures every time we would visit. Visiting grandma was always fun! I learned how to spit watermelon seeds in her back yard, thanks to my uncles. My favorite was the whirly birds because Grandma would get down on the floor with us and fly them, too. Although, playing Perfection with my cousins and Tom was also fun. We got pretty good at beating the game before it exploded.
When household computers became a thing, my dad bought a Commodore 64. Tom and I used to play computer games on it, but it was so old we had to use the keyboard, there wasn't a joystick or controller for that. It had some amazing games that we just loved. Then it was outdated and we weren't able to play on it any longer. So, dad bought us an Odyssey when all the other kids (and our Uncle Alex) had an Atari. The Odyssey had some knock-off games that were a lot of fun, but we loved going to Uncle Alex's and Aunt Joan's to play with them.
As I got older, we played mostly card games. As a teenager, it was pretty common to have several friends over playing Scum, 10-15 of us squished around the table. When we would get too rowdy for cards, we’d go outside and play Sardines.
