When childhood memories come calling

I’ve been thinking a lot, lately, about my childhood, or just what it used to be like to be a kid in the midst of all the grown-up stuff we were ignorant of or allowed to pretend we knew nothing about.  Why the nostalgia about the past?  It’s not nostalgia really…I don’t actually wish to be a kid again. It’s just memories about the way things used to be, and what it was like to grow up as a kid in a small town.   

Maybe it’s due to the preview I watched recently of Stephen King’s novel, It, which is about to make its way on the big screen in a few months. I have always enjoyed horror and suspense novels and I’ve been reading King since even before I became a teen. Like many of his stories, the novel, It, certainly struck a chord with readers, as many could relate to having some sort of childhood fear. I remember my biggest fear as a kid was that something was in my closet, or under my bed. I couldn’t sleep without the closet door being closed, and when I went to bed I would run and jump onto the mattress, rather than risk getting my bare feet too close to what might lie beneath it.

Thankfully, I’m not afraid of clowns, or I probably wouldn’t have been able to make it through the book King wrote about Pennywise and the children who met him, but there is one thing I’m afraid of, which I won’t mention for those who plan to see the movie but haven’t read the book (and if the movie sticks to the script). I just know it’s one part of the movie when I’ll likely be closing my eyes, or at least peeking through my fingers.

Aside from the childhood fears, there are days when I miss what being a kid was all about – when all you really did was live in the moment. I’m talking before we learned to dread Mondays and wish for Fridays. Before cell phones and video games, before there were more than five channels on the television (oops, I’m dating myself!). There was no whole day spent inside the house in front of any kind of screen. That just wasn’t allowed, or you’d likely get put to work. I grew up on a family farm with hardly any neighbors other than nearby family and with many acres available for us to explore. My brother and I would take off, even as fairly young kids, to go for a walk through the woods, hang out at the creek all afternoon or ride our bikes down the road to our cousin’s house.  Obviously, these days, letting your kids just roam around like that isn’t really advisable.   

But that’s the adult in me talking.

The kid in me didn’t think like that. 

Instead, we followed where our curiosity led us. We’d catch frogs or, even better, find frog eggs before they hatched, put them in a bucket and watch them for days until they finally hatched and we could dump them back in the creek. We’d find logs that had fallen over the perfect spot on the creek, and lie on the log with our hands stretched out towards the water, waiting patiently…until a salamander finally came up for air. We’d use our hands to catch as many crawdads or fish as we could, and see who could finally find the biggest one. We meant no harm to anything; everything we caught, we threw back to be caught another day.

Those are memories I enjoy when I recall what life was like as a kid. We didn’t think ahead to what the day might have in store for us, we lived in the moment, enjoying nature and letting curiosity drive us.

My childhood fears had no basis in fact; there was nothing in my closet or under my bed. And, like most children, even if I knew this to be true, I still thought it was possible, and nothing in the world was going to make me look to make sure nothing was hiding from me. I just jumped in bed, pulled the covers over my head and willed myself to go to sleep quickly. I feared monsters that did not exist but never thought about how I could have very easily run into a bad situation any of those days I played as a child in the woods. 

But that’s what being a kid is all about – it’s letting the imagination roam and the curiosity drive you.  And if you’re lucky, the adult in you will remember how to do that again, even if it’s only every once in awhile.