Simple pleasures

When I was a little kid I was always playing outside. My knees were constantly covered with scabs and bruises from either trying to climb the fence or taking some kind of tumble. My best friend, Leonard, lived next door to us and he and I were always playing something. One of our favorite things to do was to walk on stilts. My mom made me a set of stilts in the basement of our old house. They were painted brown wooden 1x4's with two chunks of 2x4's nailed together as the footpegs. I remember practicing with them in the basement and being really shaky at first, but before long I was clumping around on stilts that were about 6" off the ground.

As I got more proficient at stilt-ing, Leonard and I made our way to the hardware store to get ourselves bigger stilts. We made them much taller and I remember we needed to get on the front stoop of different homes around our block to get up on our stilts. Mine were probably 2 feet off the ground (okay, it doesn't sound that high, but when you are only 3'6" it is pretty high!) and Leonards were a little taller (he was a year older). We would walk around, what seemed like, all day on our stilts. Our block was situated so that only local traffic would enter and so all the kids on the street played freely so traffic was never an issue. We would walk around on the streets, sidewalks, lawns, up and down the curb, we would run and dance and have a great time on our stilts.

We moved to a house on an acerage the summer before my grade 4 year and the roads around my house were all gravel roads so that was it for my stilts. Come to think of it, that was pretty much the end of my friendship with Leonard. I remember he came out to my new house once or twice, but because he was a year older than me, we didn't go to the same school and I never really saw him anymore.

Kids are funny, eh? They just move forward and create a new world for themselves in a matter of days. It makes little difference who or where they are, so long as the focal point is on 'playing'. My new buddy became Kevin. He and I never roamed around on stilts, but we hung out a lot playing all the sports including hockey on his pond in the winter. Kevin had all the toys including a motor bike. Oh, the motor bike...