O & H . . .

Some friends of mine are sharing childhood memories . . the warm and fuzzy type . . . and it really brought me up short. When you spend 60 years creating 'life moments', it is sometimes difficult to zone in, on command, on something specific . . . which is rather odd considering I am a world class daydreamer. But selecting just one memory that sums up your childhood is as elusive as wood smoke wafting through the forest canopy.

I grew up with Ozzie and Harriet. They lived next door. Heck, they lived in my house incognito. Roger and Dorothy/O & H . . . one and the same . . . except Roger had a job and Ozzie never did. In the early years before I turned seven and we moved to a house on the lake, we lived on Cedar Road . . . a dead end street with a row of rusty mailboxes sitting haphazardly down at the corner. Twelve houses and 24 kids. Paradise. Behind our Cape Cod salt box house was a forest. Deer came up to the salt lick nailed to a tree behind the house . . . Skippy, the squirrel, ventured up the back porch steps to retrieve peanuts from our hands . . . long before anyone was scared of rabies and the like.

Haycock Brook formed the back property line and rambled on to feed into Pines Lake. Hours were spent splashing in that brook and canvasing it's banks, upturning stones, catching crayfish and newts, salamanders and efts . . . digging in the mud shoals to make 'pots' and other assorted crockery . . . scooping up hand fulls of clear cold water to quench ones thirst on hot summer afternoons. In the winter when the surface of the brook froze, we would grab our skates and dodge among the rocks following the brook upstream and deeper into the woods where here and there little ice rinks appeared in widened areas. Such was my playground.

Then one day, my parents returned from a walk to announce that we were moving to the lake. While I loved walking barefoot down the other end of Cedar Road to the lake, leaving my home to actually live on the water was daunting. But there it was, my new backyard . . . . liquid . . . and a dock. Over the years we acquired two sailboats: a Nike and a Snark; a canoe and a row boat. The Nike was little more than a bath tub with a mainsail and a jib; the Snark, an ironing board with a sail. While my sister commandeered the Nike, Lolly and I lived for summer storms to tear across the lake on white caps, tacking back and forth, hiking out, the sail of the Snark inches off the water. We went turtle hunting in summer and played ice hockey in the winter.

Ozzie and Harriet has nothing on us.