I did lots of strange things as a child, but this is one of my favorites.
I don’t remember how old I was, but I must have been pre-preteen at the oldest because we were still living in our first house by Alicia in “Someplace Town." Anyway, the age isn’t really important. Alicia (she was our neighbor), Amanda, and I loved to play in our backyard for several reasons. First of all, Alicia’s backyard did not have grass that was three feet tall. Secondly, mine and Amanda’s backyard had lots of fallen branches with which we would build odd forts instead of just using the one that came with the house.
One day the three of us had decided that the boys down the street were our enemies. And they needed to be punished. You may be thinking, what kind of crimes did these boys commit? I am not sure, I wasn’t sure then either, but it sounded like a good idea. For the next few hours we gathered large tree branches and leaned them up against one of the plum trees in our backyard. After the basic structure was finished, we started to rip up the grass in the lawn and throw it on what we were referring to as “The Beehive.”
When we were finally finished with construction we decided that the best way to give the punishment would be to beat the boys with some of the extra tree branches we had found. We waited inside The Beehive. Eventually Amanda and I sent Alicia out to try to fool the boys into coming into it, by pretending that she would give him a kiss. After about ten minutes she came back in and said “They are not home today, I didn’t see them playing outside.” They always played outside.
After waiting for another five minutes we abandoned our plots against the innocent boys and got down to the serious business of trying to disguise what we had done to our back yard. At least a third of the grass was no longer three feet high. We decided the best way to do this was to roll around on the rest of the grass until it lay flat and take all of the ripped up grass off The Beehive and scatter it across the part of the lawn that we had destroyed. We kept the frame of The Beehive up, just in case those little tormentors (the boys) decided to come out to play the next day.
I never realized how strange we were until I started talking to someone about the weird things I used to do with Amanda and Alicia, but I am happy we were strange children.
And that was my very boring first blog. Woooooo. Caitlin is not a story-teller.
