By Vanesa Brashier, editor and publisher of Bluebonnet News
When I was a child, “Go outside and play” wasn’t a suggestion. It was an assignment, and looking back now, I think some of the greatest parts of my childhood came from being sent out that door.
My mother Dorothy taught piano lessons in our home when my sisters and I were young. We lived in a small two-bedroom house, with all three of us girls sharing one bedroom, so there wasn’t much room for a piano student, a teacher and three additional children hanging around. I can’t remember exactly how many afternoons a week Mom taught, but I remember that on those days, particularly after school, we were expected to stay out of the way.
That generally meant going outside, and fortunately for us, outside was a pretty big place.
Our three first cousins — also all girls — lived directly next door. The six of us were stairstepped in age, with two girls around the same age at each level. That meant there was almost always someone your age to play with, even if that person wasn’t necessarily someone you were getting along with that particular day. My cousin Melanie Contreras can tell plenty of stories about those disagreements. We were cousins and playmates, which also meant we occasionally fought like siblings. Somehow we survived that, too, usually without an adult being called in to negotiate a peace treaty.
We had woods behind our houses on land owned by a great-uncle, a creek running through them and a rice field next door that is now used for cattle. To a child, that was an enormous territory. We didn’t need anyone to build a playground for us because we already had one. The woods could become whatever we wanted them to be, and an ordinary afternoon could turn into an adventure simply because we decided it was one.
I was a tomboy, at a time when a girl could be a tomboy without anyone questioning your gender identity. I mostly disliked being a girl when I was younger, but I outgrew that. I liked getting dirty, climbing trees, fishing, exploring the woods and doing just about anything that involved being outside or hanging around with my dad. I had my own fishing tackle box for crawfishing in the creek, my own Daisy BB gun and a slingshot. I don’t remember what I thought I needed all that equipment for, but apparently I was prepared for just about anything.
Side note: The foot portion of a pair of pantyhose worked wonders for catching crawfish. We would stuff the bait, generally chicken livers, inside and dangle it in the water. The crawfish would grab hold and get their pincers caught in the pantyhose, so you were almost certain to pull one up. Plus, as far as this tomboy was concerned, catching crawfish was a much better use for hosiery.
We took turns shooting the BB gun until we ran out of pellets, rode our bicycles, caught tadpoles and climbed trees. I had a pony named Trigger that we rode, and I occasionally pretended I was Tarzan and tried swinging from the vines behind our house. Occasionally I am still called upon at family gatherings to do the Tarzan yell. We also played softball in the small front yard of our home, which resulted in me breaking at least one window pane from an errant softball and earning the childhood nickname “Slugger.”
There were snakes around, of course. We lived beside a rice field in Southeast Texas, so snakes were simply part of the landscape. We knew they were there, and I quickly learned which ones were harmless and could be picked up and which ones needed to be left alone. Seeing a snake wasn’t automatically a reason to run screaming for the house. You looked at it, figured out what kind it was and acted accordingly.
That is one childhood lesson that has definitely stuck with me. To this day, I am still the person who gets called when the kids find a harmless snake. I’ve picked up more than a few for them over the years, which I suppose is proof that all those afternoons wandering around a creek and rice field weren’t entirely unsupervised foolishness. I actually gained some useful information.
I do not remember being afraid of the woods. If anything, I remember being curious about them. There was always something to investigate, somewhere to go or something to catch. We could spend an afternoon at the creek, wander through the trees or get on our bicycles and see where we ended up.
Looking back now, I realize just how much freedom we had. We were not confined to our own yard. Our little world extended down the road and even across the highway. We walked across that highway to our grandparents’ house. Sometimes we walked down the road to visit other cousins, and sometimes we stopped at our great-grandmother’s house.
It was on one of those walks, when I was about 7 years old, that I discovered something absolutely fascinating in the highway: a dead turtle. Not just a dead turtle, either. This poor creature had been run over and was essentially flattened against the pavement.
A sensible child might have felt sorry for it, stepped around it and continued on her way. I was not that child. For reasons that made perfect sense to my 7-year-old brain, I peeled that dead turtle off the highway and carried it with me to my great-grandmother’s house. I apparently regarded it as some sort of treasure worthy of sharing.
When I arrived, my great-grandmother, Eva Ann McCreight, was sitting on the porch. I do not remember giving her any warning or explanation. I just walked up and plopped my discovery directly into her lap. She did not share my enthusiasm, and to this day, I do not think I have ever heard my first and middle names spoken with quite that much vehemence.
I can laugh about it now, but memories like that also make me realize how much of our childhood entertainment came from simply exploring the world around us. Nobody had to entertain us because, most of the time, we were expected to entertain ourselves.
We did have a television, but this was long before streaming services and before we had cable TV. There were only so many channels to choose from, and even those weren’t always available to us because Mom and Dad didn’t allow us to spend all day watching television. If they said no TV, you better believe we didn’t watch TV.
There was no sneaking off with a tablet or pulling a phone out from under the covers. There was not another television in every bedroom. When the television was off, it was off, and we had to find something else to do.
Eventually we had a VHS player and a small collection of movies on tape. Having movies you could watch whenever you wanted was pretty exciting at the time, although “whenever you wanted” still depended heavily on whether Mom and Dad said you could.
One of the movies we had was “Jaws,” and for some inexplicable reason, I must have watched that movie dozens of times as a child. In hindsight, it also explains quite a bit about me today. I am still not particularly comfortable swimming in water I can’t see through.
The funny thing is that I do not remember feeling deprived because we weren’t allowed to watch much television. I do not remember sitting around thinking there was nothing to do. There was always something to do because the world outside the house was enormous when you were a child.
Kids still play outside today, of course. I see my own grandchildren doing it, and I love watching them have their own adventures, but childhood has changed. There are so many more things competing for children’s attention now, and so much of their entertainment comes directly to them through phones and tablets without requiring them to go anywhere, make anything up or even be bored for very long.
I do not necessarily think everything about our childhood was better. There are conveniences and safety measures today that I am glad we have. When I think about some of the things we did, I also understand why parents and grandparents worry. We crossed a highway on foot. We played near a creek and a rice field where snakes were a fact of life. We climbed trees, swung from vines, rode a pony and shot a BB gun. We wandered around without anyone being able to reach us by cellphone because cellphones did not exist.
I am not sure I would be completely relaxed watching one of my grandchildren recreate my childhood, but I would not trade mine.
Some of my happiest memories did not cost anything. They did not require subscriptions or batteries. Nobody scheduled them for us, and most of them were never photographed. There are not hundreds of pictures documenting those afternoons because nobody was following us around with a camera. I just remember them.
Those afternoons taught us things without anyone setting out to teach us. We learned how to entertain ourselves and how to use our imaginations. We learned how to explore, how to take reasonable risks and, probably through some unreasonable ones, where our limits were. We learned to work out disagreements without an adult referee standing nearby. We learned to watch where we stepped, how far we could wander and when it was time to head home.
My husband has a saying, “Boredom is a lack of creativity,” and I agree with that. When we were children, being bored usually meant it was time to come up with something to do.
Sometimes boredom was just the few minutes before somebody came up with an idea. Maybe we would get our bicycles or maybe we would go to the creek. Maybe we would climb a tree or head into the woods. Whatever we decided, we didn’t need much to turn an ordinary afternoon into something memorable.
I don’t think we need to recreate the 1970s for today’s children, and I am certainly not suggesting we turn them loose with BB guns and tell them to be home sometime before dark. But maybe every now and then we can turn off the television, put away the tablets and phones, and give them the chance to discover what they can come up with on their own. Let them get a little dirty, explore the backyard, build something, climb something, catch something or simply be bored long enough for their imaginations to kick in. They might complain at first, but they also might make the kind of memories they’ll still be laughing about 50 years later.
I am grateful for those days. I’m grateful that there were times when there was nothing on television for us to watch, and even more grateful for the times when Mom and Dad simply would not let us watch it. I am grateful that “go outside and play” forced us to figure out what happened next.
More than 50 years later, I do not remember very many afternoons I spent sitting in front of the television, but I remember the woods, and I definitely remember the turtle.
That was great read Vanessa! Greg