My 2nd cousin Mark continues to uncover (and post on Facebook AND tag me in, for all the world to see!) documented relics of my '80s childhood. Thank goodness most of the pictures are my favorites any way, including this quintessential 'summers at Grandma & Grandpa's house' photo...
(my cousins and I; c.1986, Gma&Gpa's Farm in the Lower Valley)
What you can't see (or hear) are our 'prize captures' (and doomed pets) - June Bugs - hissing their dissatisfaction at us regarding their captivity in our specially crafted peanut butter 'bug jars.' (Don't worry all you PETA-lites: Grandma poked holes in the lids for ventilation...)
And then I'm sure we left our exotic farm finds to bake in the sun while we ran through the sprinklers, played hide and seek in the corn stalks, rode the horses bareback through the grapevines, chased wild kittens, explored the old chicken coop, outhouse, & musty cellar, had snacktime of cottage cheese with home-canned peaches, napped next to Grandma's library and Grandpa's guncase, woke up to play "None of Your Beeswax" (our name for our very wildly aerobic, loud, and injury-prone pillow-fights, always requiring "The Alligator" to heal somebody's game-related wounds [you'll have to ask if you want an explanation ha!]) and "Spaceship" (our version of Star Trek, complete with a 'medical sick-bay doctor' and 'planetary landing preparedness pills,' consisting of Grandma's colorful pill-book we found during nap-time and whatever 'medicine' [M&Ms, peanuts, etc.] we could surreptitiously abscond with & over-indulge on)...basically, getting ourselves into any sort of highly-imaginative and adventurous trouble we could possibly get our hands on (R&C - remember our 'experiments' with vitE capsules in the bathroom?? ha!!)...
...soon enough we'd have forgotten entirely about the curiously nasty, striped & noisy critters that roamed all over Grandma's garden, making squishy messes under our sandals on the path to her door...
June Bugs - (c) 2005 Christine
I swear: those quarter-sized beetles somehow looked a whole-heck-of-a-lot cuter when I was 5.
(While there's definitely no jury out on my continued tom-boyishness, you certainly won't find me picking up one of these creatures again anytime soon!)
