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Village Squire, 1979-08, Page 42P.S. When lazy summer days were guilt free Someone, somewhere should be printing picket signs. Someone should be planning demonstration strategy. Someone should be planning how to organize kids to protest. Here we are in the year of the child and adults are busy trying to get changes in the law that will deprive children of one of their greatest rights: the right (or rite) of summer vacations. Oh I know it makes sense, this plan people are promoting to close the schools down during the cold, stormy winter and shorten the summer vacation. I know it should conserve energy. I know it would be safer by keeping school buses filled with children off the icy roads on days when it's storming so hard you can't see your hand in front of your face. And yes I know that times have changed; that the long summer vacation was designed back in the days when the majority of people lived on farms and the children were needed to work to get the crops in and off. The long vacation was not just a matter of convenience then but of necessity. If the school didn't have a two-month break in summer there wouldn't have been any children in the classroom anyway. Many a father wasn't too struck on education at the best of times. Yes I know there's a lot of common sense to the proposal, sense from an adult's point of view at any rate. But has anybody asked the kids? Memories of what summer holidays used to be like came back a little the other day when I sneaked a few minutes one noon hour to lie on a lawn chair out on the side lawn. Just lying there, face up to the warm sunshine, feeling that warm feeling of contentment and lassitude creep through my body with the heat of the sun the thoughts of those long ago summers came flooding back. Those days before we became old enough to be plagued with guilt feelings of work that should be done or summer jobs we should have because those things were expected of us were the most pleasant memories of my childhood, and I suspect of the childhood of others. People talk of the creativity of childhood and I think it was never more alive than in those early summers when my best friend, my kid brother and I, roamed our two farms looking for real and imaginary adventures. It was a time when children didn't have so many ready-made entertain- ments and there were even fewer on our farms as parents struggled to keep heads above financial waters as the economics of hard times on the farm pushed them downward. We didn't notice though. There 40 Village Squire, August 1979 were so many delights waiting in every corner of the hundreds of acres we roamed freely. Those were the dying days of the old method of putting hay in the barn "loose" before the baler took over. It was an adventure to watch the hay mount on the wagon as it was pulled from the hayloader and packed down. It was a marvel to watch the giant hay fork driven into the wagonload, the horses or tractor pull the rope and the load rise magically up from the wagon up, up to the ceiling and scurry across the wooden or metal track at the top of the barn to the mow where with a tug of the trip rope. Sometimes we kids would be enlisted to help pack down the hay and we'd tramp around the mow until our legs ached. But when the men finished in the mow our fun had just begun. The high beams of the barn made perfect climbing places, the tow rope of the hay fork made a perfect swing and the loose hay in the mow made a perfect, sweet smelling and soft landing place. We would play like Tarzan for hours on end. I remember visiting city cousins. weary from hours of swinging in the hay mow bemoaning to parents that they didn't have anything like this in the city. Then there was the creek at the back of our neighbour's farm for fishing and swimming and exploring adventures as lively as any Livingstone had in the Congo. We roamed the woods discovering imagined Indian burial grounds and looking for arrow heads we never found. We hunted bears and wolves and deer with stick guns. We played more formal games too, though equally informally. A newly -cut hayfield became a baseball field until the second cut clover grew too tall. A bat, a ball and a few friends from down the "line" and we had a great time. A closely -cropped cow pasture became a golf course with the use of curved wooden branches and tree roots for clubs and plenty of hazards of a kind they never face at the Canadian Open. We had some derelict cars in the orchard that provided hundreds of hours of entertainment. We invented machinery of all kinds and built things that never worked the way we hoped. We played at being everything from farmers like our parents to airplane pilots to Indian hunters to soldiers fighting Hitler. And the nice thing was it was completely guiltless. When we got older such moments of escape were always accompan- ied but pangs of conscience because there was always something "useful" we could be doing with those minutes or hours. Those days of being free to do nothing but dream in the summer sun are gone. Should we really take those pleasures away from today's kids? HAND CRAFTED PINE FURNITURE Pine Furniture Crafts & Collectables Varied selection of PINE REPRODUCTIONS Quilts Pottery Tiffany Lamps Candles Giftware Crafts New Summer Hours: Tues., Wed. & Sat. 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thurs. & Fri. 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Sun. 12 to 6 Closed Mon. LOCATED BELOW STAN'S VILLAGE MARKET SEBRINGVILLE TEL. 393-6660 THE BOOK SHOP 13 WELLINGTON STREET N. ST. MARYS (519) 284-3171 Enjoy the relaxed atmosphere of a friendly bookstore. Browse and talk books. 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