Wide Open Spaces

This is why our kids enjoy spending the day at my Dad's...my childhood home...so much. I tell them all the time how wonderful it was to grow up in the country...away from concrete, interstates, and close neighbors. As children, the land was our playground...we had horses to run wide open and three wheelers to ride until they ran out of gas...never repeating in the same day a path already taken. There were always new things to discover and new places to claim as our own. Mama and Daddy never had to worry about us wandering too far from home because for as far as we could see, we were home. We rode our bikes to get to new places, not just for the sake of riding up and down the road. The world was our playground because our home and the land around it was our world.

We don't get to spend as much time at my childhood home with our children as I would like to. My Dad and stepmother are away a lot on the pipeline, so we have to squeeze in as many visits as we can while they are home. The older and more independent our kids get, the more they look forward to these visits. While I enjoy the conveniences of where we now live, I often wish that we were raising our children in the environment that I grew up in. I'm thankful that they will at least have memories like today to claim as part of their childhood.

I felt like one of the Waltons today as we all piled up in the back of my Dad's truck for a ride around his new land. This is a beautiful piece of land that I can already picture full of cows that I know will one day roam it. The hay bales were scattered around the well tended land, framed like a favorite painting by the trees that surrounded it. It felt like such a safe place, calling us to come back with our tent and stay for a night or two. My dad and stepmother were patient with all of us "kids" as we insisted on climbing on the hay bales and acting as if, for just a while, we were all one age...still the kids that hide inside of us all waiting for those snatches of time when they can all come out and play again.

And play we did!!!!