By Carole C. Griffin, Meriden, CT

Some one told me once that I should write only about what I knew about. That in some way, I should try and hit a chord of other people's remembering. It’s awful hard to write about something that everybody might have experienced...and if it was that familiar, what's the use of writing about it.
 

I guess if I had to tell a story, I'd tell ya to relax and close your eyes and think back to a time when life was a whole lot simpler and you didn't know which was faster, your eyes waking up or your feet hitting the floor. Boy, those were the days when there was so much to do you had to get up and out Early...a whole, world out there to explore.
 

Did you ever get a big bowl of corn flakes or Pep and sit on the front steps eating and watching the sun come up over the eastern hills? Can you still feel the warmth of the rays as they fell on your bare legs, and look! the sun is turning all the dew-drenched spider webs into strings of jewels that shimmers in the early light.
 

How still those mornings were. Sometimes, I thought I would wake the whole world with my crunching on my cereal. I see a dragon fly, and you can almost hear the beat of his wings. I don’t know another time in my life when grass smelled as goad as it did on those mornings when I waited for my friends to come by for me. When every hour held an adventure. When each day lived was a precious gift of childhood.
 

One day, Jimmy and Walter came by to get me to go frog hunting. I had never done that before, and I was scared to death of frogs. But I didn't want them to know it. When we got to the gravel pit I elected to be the one on the log raft who would jump up and down and scare all the old bull frogs onto shore where they could be caught. But that day I met up with the meanest bullfrog there ever was. He wasn’t frightened of my rocking the raft; he stuck his big, old mean head right up between the logs right between my bare feet, and he croaked! That was too close. If he was getting on my raft. I was getting off! I jumped into the water and started running for the shore. The boys were yelling and my foot hurt. When I reached shore, I found that I had landed on a piece of scrap lumber and put a big nail through my foot. I laid there crying while the guys ran for help. The nearest neighbor carried me home, my grandmother was called. she came in her vintage Chevy to take me to the nearest doctor where I got a tetanus shot. As I remember it, the foot healed faster than the shot site.
 

I gave up frog hunting for the rest of that year, and stuck to things like hunting and fishing and trying to ride farmer Porter's heifers. He didn't like us messing with his cows and he warned us that he would turn his bull out in the pasture if we didn't stop. We knew he wouldn't, or we thought we really wouldn't, until one Saturday when we were having our own wild, west show, we heard an awful snort and came pretty close to a pretty miserable critter. No one had to say a word, we all went running as fast as we could. The pasture was long and narrow, with few trees anywhere. But the one big tree we saw, we ran for. I never knew we were so agile. How we flew! How we climbed! But the bull was fast and agile too. It wasn't long before that bull was butting his head against the tree and bellowing like a thing gone mad. When we were running for that tree it looked like a good size, but that bull made it pitch and sway with every hit of its huge body . We were in real trouble and we knew it. It seemed like hours that we hung onto that tree. The sun was going down and the bull still tramped and bellowed beneath our feet. Well we did get saved. One of the kid's father came looking for us and had to get the farmer to ring his bull while we went scampering through the barbed-wire fence and over the hill to home. We all got punished, although I think the hours up that tree were punishment enough.
 

It seems like I was always being grounded for something or other. Usually it wasn't even my fault. But my mother would say if I was in the vicinity, I was just as guilty. Vicinity to her was anywhere in the same town. There was a girl in town that liked to follow us around. She was pretty hefty and couldn't keep up with us, so we didn't like her following us all the time. One afternoon. we decided to go across the pasture (no calves there on this day) and see what types of salamanders we could find in the stream at the edge of the woods. The farmer had placed a huge oaken barrel at the far edge of his pasture and a pipe from the stream filled the barrel so the cows could drink. The barrel had been there for a long time and slick green moss had grown to the damp outer edges. We were used to the watering hole, and could hoist ourselves up and drink with no problem, but our chubby little friend had never done so, and when she tried to follow our lead, she lost her balance and fell head first into the barrel. With the three of us pulling, it was very evident we were not going to get her out of the barrel. My two friends went running across the field for help, and I braced my feet on top of the barrel, and with her long. red curls in my hands I would pull her head out of the water and say. "Breathe Martha, breathe." Needless to say, my friends captured the first adult they met on the street and Martha was saved, and we were all punished, again.
 

Did I tell you that I could hit a baseball almost the furthest of anybody in town? Well I could. I remember that summer when I hit that ball clear across the meadow and it broke a window of the grammar school. I was a hero for weeks after that. Didn't get caught. Didn't get punished.
 

And then there was the times when the guys would stop by after supper and we would go up the street to the empty lot to play kick-the-can or hide ‘n seek. Those were good times. Everybody laughing and carrying on. It was like that on that last night. The night when we were all hiding and I had found a soft grass-filled nest between some alder bushes. Just right for hiding. I remember that it was dusk, a faint tinge of red was etching the clouds in the west. It was warm, and there were crickets singing that night. As I lay watching for a chance to tag home, I could feel the heat from the earth flowing into my body. Then it happened. Someone else had found my hiding place. He parted the alders and peeped out, then, before I knew what was happening, my friend, kissed me. It was more than I could deal with, and I jumped up and ran and was called "It" but I kept on running. Not until I reached home did I dare to think about what had happened. I cried that night. For something had been forever lost to me. My childhood. That one kiss drew a line across my heart. I no longer would be one of the guys. They had made it plain that I was different, I was a girl. There would be no more fishing trips, or frog chasing, or hunting expeditions. I was banned forever from that world that I had loved...I had lost a treasured time, I had lost that time of innocence. I had stepped across that line, into the world of women.