hopscotch

That tangy smell of earth these days transports me back to school days. As we had no sidewalks or any paved area to chalk, our hopscotch days were necessarily in the warm earth days. When spring came sashaying into our school yard, the grounds grew soft and then downright muddy. But that's when we would take sticks, make them as sharp as we could and carefully sketch out the hopscotch board in the soft earth. Then the trick was to find a flat stone with a nicely balanced heft and off we went! I can never pass a hopscotch grid on my walks even now without hopping through the single, double jumps! What an extraordinarily simple bit of fun. Do kids these days even know what a hopscotch game looks like?

Again, this theme reverberates that as a child I played a lot of the games my parents did as children. When our sons were growing up, they played some things we did. But this generation of kids finds their pleasures in such enormously different playgrounds that it's hard to take in. A swing, rope and board, metal chain and seat, old tire and rope - whatever variation provided hours of fun! Trees were for climbing, fences for straddling, field and creeks for exploring. Now so many hours are spent with a gadget of some kind in hand.

Sad.

Hopscotch rocked!