These stairs may not look like anything special, but they led to magical places when I was a kid. Some of my fondest memories come from both ends of these stairs.
At the top of the stairs is a gravel road, and across that road is the house where my cousins lived. We had loads of fun together when I visited them during the summer. For a city kid, there were lots of new adventures at my cousin’s. Lots of room to play ball, go fishin’, swimming, and messing around in the County “pole yard”. Across the road from the other side of my cousin’s house was a huge storage yard owned by the County. You would find spare utility poles, bales of wire, fence posts, stacks of wood, crates of insulators, railroad ties, oil drums painted orange, old truck bodies, and plenty of rocks to throw at the steel barrels. I can still here the hollow bonnnnggg when we scored a direct hit on an empty barrel. We called it the pole yard. We could sure invent a lot of ways to have fun in there.
At the bottom of the stairs was a dock that floated on a huge lake. The dock was huge and was constructed of large poles and bridge timbers, probably from the aforementioned pole yard. It was about 15′ wide with usually three 20′ long sections, depending on the water level. The first section was solidly anchored to the shore, while the other two were hinged and could rise and fall with the water level. The dock always smelled like a mixture of creosote and catfish bait.
During the summer, my cousins, brother and I would go swimming three times a day. We’d wake up in the morning and slip right into our swim suits, and not take them off until we went to bed. Why bother with underwear, we knew we were going swimming. My Aunt Margie would always make a huge breakfast of eggs, bacon, pancakes, toast, etc. It was great, but then, of course, she’d make us wait an hour for our stomach to settle before we could go swimming. That hour wait was about the only “down time” we had the whole time I was there.
So, it didn’t matter whether I was going up or down the stairs, I was heading for some serious fun. Think about it, there’s not too many sets of stairs in your life that have fun at both ends.
Thought for the Day: Youth would be an ideal state if it came a little later in life. Herbert Henry Asquith
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