Jill's Journal: In the good ol’ summertime ...

There are days that I long to go back to more simple times. You know, the days where cell phones didn’t dictate or document every moment of our lives and kids ran and played outside all day until moms and dads called them home from the back steps.

I mentioned these thoughts to a few “more seasoned” people last week, and like me, they also miss those days, especially in the good ol’ summertime.

Like many Baby Boomers, I was fortunate to have a stay-at-home mom. Although her job was to maintain the house and keep watch over my brother and me, her week was structured. Monday was wash day. Tuesdays were dedicated to ironing Monday’s wash, and Saturdays, unless we were hitting the road for a weekend visit to Grandma and Grandpa’s, were dedicated to dusting and vacuuming and the like. As kids, and as it should be, keeping our bedrooms picked up was our responsibility and reason for weekly allowances.

Speaking of allowances, the few dollars they plunked into my hands each week went a long way at the local “dime store”, or in our town, better known as “Ben Franklin.” There, a handful of penny candy could be had for a quarter. The fun of the row of penny candy was hand-picking out each piece, of which many were not wrapped, like the cherry-flavored, coin-shaped candies known as “gummies” today.

As kids, I don’t think we realized then the pure pleasures of a more simpler life, like making a fort out of the neighbor’s clothesline covered in blankets or hauling every piece of my Barbie collection outside for full day of play. I remember scooping up jars of tadpoles from the nearby vacated railroad track ditches that filled with water every spring and the multiple Kool-Aid stands we set up in hopes of making a few pennies before we drank up all the profits ourselves.

For a single dime, we could get on ‘the dime bus’ that took us to Long Lake for an afternoon of swimming in the summertime. The school bus was packed with kids of all ages and sizes, hauling inflated innertubes scavenged from the gas station. Nearly every window would be open so the hot breeze that whipped through the bus kept us from “melting.”

I cherished the town’s Crazy Day promotion in early August each year, and the simple fun that could be had plucking a 50-cent grab bag out of the bin at Ben Franklin’s or the refreshing taste of a Mr. Freezie purchased for pennies at Plumhoff’s popcorn stand at Memorial Park.

Nighttime games of ‘Hide-and-Go-Seek” went on without fail. Kids in the neighborhood knew as the sun began to set, it was time to show up at the front porch of Knutson’s house. Once we all arrived, we each stuck a “dirty” foot into the circle where “Your mother, my mother lives across the street …” were tapped out to determine who would be the hiders and who would be the seeker.

As I grow older in this life, a smile tends to spread across my face when I think back to a time when life was simpler, when moms beckoned their kids home with a shout from the back door and you knew every friend’s home phone number – a landline – from memory. Crazy thing, I can still rattle off a handful of those numbers.

These moments and more, my friends, are truly “good ol’ summertime” memories of a less-complicated time.