There was a big front yard with ‘the woods’ on the opposite side. We played Tarzan on vines that hung like hair from under a witch’s hat. We fought battles against dragons and sometimes defeated Indians, rebel soldiers, the Germans and Japanese, all in a single day. We found bones in those woods, perhaps from an animal, perhaps from something else. Inside the house we battled apparitions and other unexplained phenomena. Much of the time we were scared.
Down the porch steps and to the right and over a small mound we often walked along a small path, created by the six kids in our household and the dozen or so other kids in the immediate neighborhood. The weeds to one side of the path tickled my knees, but of course my knees were closer to the ground then. Up over and down another small hill a ways was a secret cave where we hid from our parents and smoked cigarettes. The older kids told stories we little ones shouldn’t have heard and they frightened us with four letter words – kill, hate, beat, rape, dead and so on. On good days in the caves, we dreamed the kind of dreams that took us away from the house.
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