Day 18 - Your hometown.

Day 18 - Your hometown.


My hometown is only 10 mins away from where I am now.

But, it is completely different now than it was when I grew up. My dad still lives there and I have friends there so I see it all the time.

The 'heart' of the town basically crossed the street. When I was little the tiny grocery store and little restaurant, etc was on the opposite side of the highway than where I lived. We crossed the highway several times a day. Now they have a bigger grocery store and more business.

When I grew up we had one stop light, we now have 3.

I would still live there but there are SEVERAL subdivisions with really, really expensive houses on them , so the taxes are way to high. It is kinda known to be a slightly ritzy area. So ritz = high taxes. That is the only reason I don't live there now.

It is actually considered a 'village' and not a town.

But the best part of my hometown was my neighborhood.

We had the best group of neighbor kids. We would hang out from 8am until the street lights came on. There was probably a group of 20 or so of us and we did everything together. We played this game called "Lost Kids" where we pretended we were runaway orphans and we had to survive on our own. This game was played in our backyard because we had a bunch of trees and my dad made one of them into a play area by cutting some branches down. (one funny thing is that if we ever saw a real airplane in the sky...we would yell hide and run under anything we would see...trees, bushes, cars, etc...we pretended that is was the orphanage trying to find us...then one of us would say "coast if clear") We also played 'ghosts in the graveyard' which is just hide and go seek in the dark, but we used the entire neighborhood, which made it impossible to find anyone. So, we would dress all in black...play one round and then hang out at the park for the rest of the night. But, we did this every night. We spent more time dressing in black and picking who was 'it' then ever playing the game. We would start at the merry-go-round at the park (the 'it' person would stand in the middle and we would all stand around it with our knees touch the merry-go-round) and then the 'it' person would cover their eyes and count to 60. When they started counting we all would sprint. We had one minute to hide, but we had the entire neighborhood to hide in. (anyone's yard was game and we never got yelled at????) Then basically you sat in your hiding spot until you got bored and walked back to the park. At this time there might be 3-4ish people already there who got bored first. So basically the game was 'who gets bored first while sitting in someones backyard behind there wood pile' or whatever you were hiding behind. Churches were the best placed to hide. Then we all would sit at the park 'shooting the shit' until we went home.

Our parents were pretty layed back (everyone's parents) We left at 8am and when the streetlights came on we had to go home for dinner, and then we would leave again. The parents basically had an understanding that whoever had our group over at their house around noon fed everyone lunch. (pbj/mac&cheese/hotdogs/leftovers) My mom never asked me if I ate lunch or what I ate. (who knows...maybe the parents called each other...I don't know?) From the time I could remember till 8th grade....I was never in a house. We lived in the neighborhood basically. Everyone's house was my house and my house was everyones. We were in and out and here and there. We lived on our bikes.

(there were times we would play someone's video games and the kids who lived there weren't even home...we just knocked on the door and asked if we could play. We would sit with their parents while their kids were gone....we also jumped on other trampolines without them being home...they would pull into their driveways, wave at us, and walk inside)

In the winter, my backyard had this amazing hill and everyone would sled on it. If my family left somewhere, we would come home to find random neighbor kids in our backyard. This happened every day in the winter. We would even go to bed with kids still out there.

I did grow up with two brothers (one older and one younger) and we always got along. We still do. So we were together all the time.

If we weren't playing at the park we were at the school playground, the fire station, any of the churches, buying candy at the grocery store, renting movies, going on long bike rides, eating at the restaurant (but paying in change), getting ice cream, etc etc.