Remember jumping rope? Playing Jacks? Marbles? Collecting baseball cards? My brother probably had a hundred or so … who knew how much some of them would be worth today if they hadn’t been bent or traded or lost on the playground?
My girlfriends and I would play these games endlessly at school during recess. “Nicky and Bucko sitting in a tree, K.I.S.S.I.N.G.” But when PJ and I got home from school (on a rickety yellow bus), our mother, always dressed in “pedal pushers” and a white sweatshirt, would hand us a glass of milk and a cookie or two, wait for us to change, and kick us out the back door. Then it was just us.
We lived in Hopkinton without a near neighbor so usually had only each other to deal with. He was two years younger, and for a long time would do anything I ordered him to do until he wised up and got bigger than me and we pretty much became equals.
There was an abandoned orchard on what had once been our property when it was a farm, and we’d usually head out there to climb the fallow trees and look for wizened, unfertilized apples in the fall, or break little branches to create swords, or lie in the trees and wonder what it had looked like before. We made tiny towns in the woods, making roads banked by pine needles, and PJ, who had an astounding collection of big and little trucks, would create highways and I’d make houses out of mushroom caps and people out of acorns. We probably argued, but I don’t remember that — I just remember calming down after a long, anxious day at school for me.
Anyone ever swing birches? Robert Frost was right — you can. The trunks are limber, and if you are only a kid, it was easy to skin up as far as you could until the thin top of the tree would begin to bend, and we’d jump and grab and be softly deposited back on the ground.
The sound of the ringing cowbell hanging outside the back door would be mom’s call home and back we’d go to reality and bath and homework and dinner and bed. Some of my childhood memories are blurry, and perhaps some even may not be true, but those afternoons seem so clear to me. No TV, no phone, no distraction. Just a time in my life I can still think on when I can’t sleep at night or am uselessly worrying over something I cannot control. I’m sure grateful.
I have moved away from, back, away again and now back for good to Hopkinton. I’m too creaky to swing a birch, but the definition of my New Hampshire and why I can’t seem to stay away is founded on these memories.
Martha Ritzman Johnson lives in Hopkinton.