Being a Kid was Awesome

Did any of you guys read the book "Roxaboxen" as a kid? That was definitely the best ever. It's about some kids in a neighborhood in New Mexico and the make believe world they create (called Roxaboxen). And they have shiny pebbles for money, and a graveyard for a lizard that died, and they have "houses" and "cars" and the kids set up lemonade stands and stuff.

Anyway, so I'm the hugest dork ever (and unforgivably sentimental), so I'm watching home videos on a Sunday night, and I found some footage of our family's version of Roxaboxen. We didn't have quite as cool of a name, in fact, it's a pretty terrible name. We called it Greenfield. Actually, I'll take the blame. I named it Greenfield. But, I would also like to point out that I came up with the idea.

Basically, we rent a cabin in Truckee almost every summer, and (once I came up with the idea), we recreated the town of Greenfield in the large downstairs room every year. When I say we, I mean me and my two siblings, and my five cousins. Once we hit high school and could invite friends on our vacations, we had some friends in it too. And yes, I said high school. I'm really that cool.

So, we had a bank (that's my cousin Rachel in the picture - she was the banker. The table is the bank, in case you were wondering), a hair salon, a recreation area, a cartoonist, a marker salesman/auctioneer, a restaurant ($1 of fake money for a cup of goldfish - good deal), etc. At least, those were the original establishments the first year. I think it changed slightly every year. We had an inn, a library, an art studio, stuff like that.

We also had "kingdoms" outside. It started way back in the day. Rachel was really upset (she might have been arguing with my sister, Becky...maybe?), so I was trying to be the nice big cousin and make her feel better. So we hiked out in the back further than we'd gone before (actually, it wasn't very far, but we'd never really bothered to explore before. We kind of liked to stick to the same old at that point), and we found an area with all these baby trees. And there was a rock ("castle") sticking out of the ground in a grove of taller trees, so I gave the whole area to Rachel as her kingdom. That day actually ended badly, as Rachel got stung by a bee on the top of her head near the border of her kingdom, but the fad caught on and soon everyone had one.

Mine was next to the house, and I had two or three castles. One was a pile of rocks next to a young tree that I named Apple. I believe to this day that Apple is a great name for a tree. I'm still not sure what Gwyneth Paltrow was thinking. Anyway. And my other main castle was the cool defensive one at the top of a slope. We had lots of wars (in fact, that was pretty much all we did), so I'd stock up pinecones and tiny rocks and wet moss (there was a little dip in the rock, which I filled with water and moss - for some reason I thought wet moss was a good thing to throw at people). I had a pretty good advantage from the top of my little hill, and the rock was only scaleable on one side, so I was pretty good at war. Yay wet moss.

We also thought logs were horses. I don't really know what that was about. We'd go horseback riding in Truckee, then come back and look at logs and think "horse"? Well, we were strange kids. So we named a few logs, and if we were sitting on them it was like we were riding the horse. Yeah, I don't think that game caught on.

Anyway, lots of good memories from Truckee. I could probably go on about it forever. Therefore, I'm going to stop. I hope you enjoyed this trip down memory lane, and maybe it made you think about when you were a kid. Those were good times. Anyway, have a lovely day.