When I was very young we lived in town. My childhoold memories were ones of our small neighborhood in a small town, in a rural western state. There were not many kids in our neighborhood...or maybe just not many we played with. I don't know if we just didn't have many kids on our block or if we just didn't get to play with some of the kids. I know now that we were poor (I did not know it then). Most of the families and kids lived in nicer homes. I remember going to one neighborhood family's home on Christmas and being surprised that their kids got more than one gift at Christmas. In fact they received many large nice gifts. That was different than at my house; I didn't know why at the time.There is not alot of noteworthy playing I remember when we lived in town. But one activity I do remember had to do with my mother's sewing drawer. As a reward for behaving well we were allowed to organize her sewing drawer. It seemed a big deal at the time. I would take all the spools of thread out of the drawer and then rearrange the spools: arrange by color, arrange by size, arrange them to create patterns with the tall spools and the narrow spools. I don't know why there were so many spools of such an incredible variety of size and style...but it made organizing them fun. It was a most pleasurable activity...playing with the spools.
We moved out of town, to a small farm when I was still fairly young, still in elementary school. Living on a farm was different. There were so many "things". A lot of dirt, old boards, pipes, ditches, culverts, fences, and wires, outbuildings, and old machinery. There were so many things to do!
I will not call it invention, maybe creative play...I can't list all the things we did, all the things we created. But it was so much richer than living in town. I'm thinking that is how most kids on farms grew up at the time. Nothing special about my situation.
After building something, we would see if it would float; we could dig a hole and create a hideout, climb a tree. We would burn things, spin things, and throw things; create sling shots, collect small quartz grains from ant hills; or build towns and roads with dirt and mud. We discovered electricity and motors and found we could spin spools on the motors and, by using any hard and sharp object, carve the spool into something else, something magical and one-of-a-kind. So we spent hours with our spools, fashioning objects of art and fascination. The process was simple, the enchantment complete. For several summers we created our carved and spun wooden spools.
You'd think I'd have kept some of them...but I didn't. I don't know what happened to them. I guess I grew up and found other things to focus on. Rockets, and chemistry sets and cutting holes in glass bottles. Fascinating play for a kid; I suppose it kept me from doing more dangerous things.
