A Southern Summer Memory

There's been a point in my life when I regularly carried chickens by their feet.

Surprised?

It's not something I've done in a very long time.  The years and newer (and very different) experiences make that memory feel far removed sometimes.  But although I have never not been bookish, I also had a country cousin who made sure I spent only so much time indoors every summer.

When I was a child, my family took an annual summer journey to rural southern Mississippi, where my grandparents lived.  We had family upon family upon family there; cousin upon cousin.  And since they were outdoorsy, we spent a lot of time outdoors with them.  I have memories of hide and seek games lasting long into the night, "cooking" with the overripe and unusable veggies from the garden, swimming in the pool, hiking through the cow pasture and fishing in the cow pond, playing with the puppies and kittens which were always present, and so on.

One summer, my cousin and constant companion, Stacie, and I spent a lot of time in the goat pen.  The goat pen was situated on the side of a gently sloping hill near everyone's houses (conveniently so--it's awfully handy to throw your leftovers and scraps over the fence behind your house and be gratified that someone will thoroughly enjoy them).  The grass had been so thoroughly devoured by the animals over the years that it was now nonexistent, and the hill was just composed of red dirt with the occasional crack running down its entire length.

Stacie and I started out trying to catch a chicken that had gotten loose in the goat pen, I believe.  That is not an easy task, let me tell you.  Even harder is trying to catch a goat who doesn't want to be caught.  We eventually got the chicken, but we gave up on the goat.  And we got our light blue jeans sufficiently stained with red dirt in the process.

The next day, Stacie got the idea to place a hose at the top of one of the cracks of the earth.  We put on our swimsuits and Keds and had a marvelous time lazing the day away playing in our girl-made creek.  Sinking our feet into the cool mud, experimenting with how we could divert the water to our liking, making tributaries that branched off of the main downhill crack, building little houses for ants and frogs.  A couple of tweens making mud pies is what it would have looked like, but that would be a very sad and inept description of our fun.

No, that interpretation would have been to put a productive adult's filter on our summer fun.  To see spending a day in the goat pen as insignificant, unimportant, perhaps even foolish activity.  But I'm glad that the adults did not come outside and say, "You need to come in now," or "We need to run to the store; come get cleaned up!"  No, they just let us play in the mud all day.  Which was anything but frivolous.  Nope, it was what childhood play should be all about.