Tired of hearing the kids grumble about having nothing to do this summer? When I was a kid, I don’t remember complaining about that because Mama or Nanny could always find more chores for me.

Of course, I had to earn my weekly allowance — doing small stuff like straightening up my room when I was young and bigger jobs when I got older like clipping the boxwood hedge around our house. But my folks were really pretty easy on us. In fact, by most standards, I’d say they spoiled us.

The kids in my neighborhood had a blast each summer, playing hard from the time we got out of bed in the morning until our parents called us in for supper. After some family time watching our favorite TV programs or swinging and rocking and visiting with neighbors on the front porch, we’d reluctantly go off to bed. Sometimes, though, I’d get out of bed, crawl behind one of the chairs in the living room and watch “Gunsmoke” without Mama and Daddy catching me.

We spent our summers swimming at the town pool, playing in the creek at the bottom of the street where I lived, building tree-houses and riding our bikes.

The creek, which wound its way through the neighborhood and on through town to the Blackwater River, was our favorite playground. My brother and I “fell” into that creek at least once a day during the summer, which didn’t make Mama happy since the wash load would double in size.

Our activities on the creek included catching crayfish, turtles, frogs and tadpoles and building bridges and dams. The best fun we had was building and playing in an elaborate tree-house in a huge water oak beside the edge of the creek at the foot of the First Avenue hill.

Do kids build tree-houses anymore? Do they even climb trees, for that matter? If they don’t, they should. Treetops are just the neatest places to be.

From our lofty vista, we could look down on all the houses in our neighborhood and across several streets to the elementary school or across the railroad tracks to the Cobbtown neighborhood.

Building the tree-house was almost as much fun as playing in it. I loved going into the mom-and-pop hardware store in my hometown and buying the big nails and the boards we needed for the ladder we built up the tree and the platforms and railings we constructed between the branches of the big oak. We purchased thick ropes which we looped around the huge limbs so we could swing down over the creek like our movie heroes, Tarzan and Jane (Cheetah, too!) We even had different “rooms” at different elevations in the tree, and strung twine between tin cans for “telephones.”

Once, we decided to have a sleep-over in the tree-house, but we got spooked by thoughts of snakes crawling up from the creek into the tree and cut it short, each of us scrambling down the tree and home to our beds before 11 p.m.

No, we never lacked for things to do in the summertime when we were kids. Ray Bradbury could easily have been writing about my childhood summers in his wonderful book, “Dandelion Wine.” Our summers were just as magical and full of adventure.

If only we could bottle the summers of our childhood and uncork them when we’re old and need to remember what it was like to be young again and carefree.

T&D Region Editor Carol B. Barker can be reached by e-mail at cbarker@timesanddemocrat.com.

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