Recalling those fun, lazy summer days of old
Where are the long lazy days of summer? And where are the children? I sat out one night last week after supper, and I could hear no children's voices, no "hidden laughter of children in the foliage/Quick now, here, now always," in T.S. Eliot's evocative words. I thought of Phyllis Parlee writing about children's play in Arlington's early days. She told in "Chronicle of a Prairie Town: Arlington Heights, Illinois" how people described playing hopscotch on squares scratched into dirt with a stick. The first playground toy was a plank balanced over a barrel. A seesaw circa 1860. Men remembered skinny-dipping in an old gravel pit near Kensington Road which they shared with wading cows, snakes - and rubbish Then a long-ago conversation with Bernice Collignon came to mind. She recalled with joy her long lazy summers at the beginning of the 20th Century when kids played with what was available, when paper dolls were cut out of the Sears Roebuck catalog. "The older children always had to have the younger with them." Many days, Bernice would load the family coaster wagon with toys and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and take her younger siblings on picnics as far west as Chestnut from their home on Evergreen near Campbell. The coaster wagon was also a useful adjunct to family transportation when Bernice would pull it to the grocery store, list in hand. As big sister, she also washed the dinner dishes.
"My younger sister was supposed to dry the dishes, but she had a way of disappearing," somehow a common complaint. When the family moved to 10 N. Mitchell, some neighbors looked askance at this family with five children. A childless woman sprinkled sand on the sidewalk so the children couldn't skate. Bernice looked back with longing at the days at Evergreen and Campbell where there was a barn full of horses across the street and sheds of lumber. There, neighborhood children could play hide and seek after supper, when the dishes were done.
"We could stay out until the streetlights came on." The height of summer there was the ritual of equine dentistry. When a horse needed a tooth pulled, the children gathered. The groom tied a cord around the offending tooth, climbed high in the barn to attach the cord to a rafter. Then somehow "they made the horse back up" fast enough to yank the offending part from its longtime quarters. Bernice was a little fuzzy about the mechanism of the actual extraction. But she was perfectly clear on how much fun it was to see the freed-up tooth swinging back and forth across the barn at the end of the cord. It was the ultimate summer event.