Childhood Memories

I'll add to this as I think of them.

Climbing to the tops of the 40 foot pine trees behind Wilson's house on a windy day so we could ride the gusts. Never considering the fallout of a broken branch...Stick fights in the pine woods behind Hodgkins! Like a snowball fight with an amped up pain factor. The only rule was you couldn't aim for the head... Sneaking bites of oatmeal cookie dough from the mixing bowl when my mother wasn't looking, then licking the beaters when she was done...Catching green crabs in the rocks at York Beach with my brother Donny, then tipping the bucket out onto the blanket that our older sister's were sunbathing on. We took a beating for that one, we were laughing when we should have been running....riding my bicycle to my first girlfriends house in sixth grade. Funny how her mom put her in private school that next year...They weren't snowball fights, they were campaigns that lasted for days and were fought with trench warfare across the neighborhood...Racing homemade gocarts (we called them gigs) down our hill. If you were lucky you had a 2x4 brake, otherwise the bottoms of your Converse All Stars didn't last very long...I was the Tim Wakefield of whiffle ball...Swimming at the lot in Dudley on Hayden pond. Donny would hold the fishing pole, I would swim with a mask on and dangle the worm and hook in front of the bass's face. True sportsmanship..Heading out on trails through the woods towards Holden. Lots of treasures to be found in an illegal dump behind the old Higgins Mansion on Salisbury St. After a few weeks the owners wised up and started kicking us out, so we followed the trail further back in the woods and came upon a bottle dump from the 1800's. This lasted for a few more weeks of digging until we were spotted and evicted again... Digging a hole in the middle of the garden for a Burmese Tiger Trap to catch any animals that might wander through. Sid made us fill it in...Sleeping out in tents and roaming the neighborhood when everyone was asleep, picking peaches from the tree in the backyard, block parties... the list goes on and on.