I’m sitting on our back deck again as I write this. The air is fresh and it’s not hot and humid, as most of these summer evenings have been. The wind is rustling the leaves in the cornfield behind the house and clouds sail lazily overhead, highlighted with brilliant yellow and gold from the setting sun. Barn swallows are still darting back and forth across the lawn looking for a snack of bugs before settling down for the night. As daylight begins to give way to the encroaching darkness, I’m surrounded by a symphony of sound as the crickets begin their evening serenade. I’ve said before that this is my favorite time of day.
Maybe that goes back to when I was young, when we could finally relax after the days chores and fieldwork were done. We would relax before heading off to bed, by sitting on the lawn under the big maple tree or lying in the cool grass because it was cooler and more comfortable outside than in the house.
From where I sit I can see the farm where I was born and spent the first nine years of my life. It’s about a mile as the crow flies. I still call it the Hauge place because a Mrs. Hauge owned it and rented it to my folks. The original house and red barn are still standing.
In between that farm and the corner of the back forty where our house sits, is the small farm where my grandparents, Oscar and Julia Hanson, lived after they moved from their farm on Clinton Ridge. The house, garage, and tobacco shed are still there. The barn was falling down and demolished a few years ago, another of those old barns gone from the rural landscape.
Across the road from their farm was Smith School where I spent eight years in that one-room school. It now exists only in the memory of those of us who were students there. It stood on that corner for over 100 years before it got in the way of the new “Uff Da Bahn” highway. Just north of the school was the Iverson farm, where Sandra (Iverson) Peterson, lived when we were in grade school. That farm lives only in my memory too. The buildings are all gone, also a victim of the new road.
I can still picture all of us kids playing hide and seek at night during 4-H meetings or neighborhood get-togethers at their farm and other farms. The nice thing about playing Hide and Seek on a farm is that there are plenty of interesting places to hide. It could be kind of spooky too. It gets really dark in the country and we worried a little about running into a skunk that was out for an evening stroll.
Did you hear that when they tore down the buildings to build the road last year, they found the bones of Little Ole who had hidden in one of the sheds almost 60 years ago? We wondered what ever happened to him. When everyone else had been found, we called, “Ole, Ole, oxen free,” but he never came out. I guess this makes him king of the hide and seekers.
I recently heard of another version of Hide and Seek called “Sardines.” In this game only one person hides and the rest try to find him. When a person finds the hider, they join him. I can see why it’s called Sardines. As more people found the hiding place, it could get mighty cramped quarters. This would have been much more fun than ordinary Hide and Seek, if we could have hid together like a bunch of Sardines with the girls. Darn, why didn’t someone tell us about this version when we were young? In the Sardines version, the last person to find the hiding place was the loser.
Summer evenings were also the time for fireflies, or as some people call them, lightning bugs. We weren’t content to just watch them, we had to try and catch them in glass jars. When we had several of them in a jar, they lit it up like a lantern. I wonder if kids still chase fireflies these days. Maybe there are too many other things to keep them occupied. I hope a few of them still have the curiosity to chase after fireflies. I’ve noticed a lot of fireflies on these warm summer evenings around our place. I hope when our grandson, Sean, gets a little older, we can sit in the dark in the backyard and let him experience the magic of trying to catch fireflies in a glass jar. We’ll also teach him to release them unharmed after observing them for a few minutes. Nature and the creatures that inhabit it, are meant to be observed and appreciated, not destroyed.
Maybe I’ll even tell him how we played Hide and Seek in the darkness of the countryside, and tell him about the Sardine version too. By the way, that part about finding the bones of Ole was just a joke. Never can tell, someone might have thought I was reporting the news and not writing historical fiction.
As I scan the twilight countryside around me and remember, I realize how much of my history and rural roots are out there. It’s a good feeling.
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