Nature's Playground

Nature's Playground

The cool wind whipped through my tangled hair as I raced down the autumn painted hill on my cardboard sled. I squealed with joy when it hit a rocky spot and soared, momentarily airborne. A muffled shriek escaped me as I narrowly escaped collision with a pine tree.

"Hurry! Bring it back up; it's my turn." My sister, Peggy, shouted to me when I reached the end of my ride.

"Nah." We've worn it out with all our riding. Let's go down to the creek for a while."

My younger sister, who did not often follow my lead, agreed to check out the stream that ran through "the bottoms", as we referred to them. It was a large, flat parcel of land, much farther down the hill, nestled at the lowest point and surrounded on all sides by hills. In the summer, part of this fertile ground served as a large vegetable garden, which supplied us with food for most of the year. This was fall, and the memories of picking squash and peas in the blistering sun were far behind me.

We went straight to the water, leaving our shoes on the grassy earth and dipping our bare toes in the water to check its temperature.

"Ah! This feels great!" Peggy waded ankle deep in the chilly stream. "What are you waitin' for? Jump in!"

The soft, cool creek mud squished between my toes, my feet determined to keep up with Peggy, who was gleefully headed downstream. We raced each other back upstream, hopping from stone to stone--a watery kind of hopscotch.

In the midst of the clearing on one side of the stream stood a lone rock. Huge and proud, it ruled the bottoms. It had, after all, survived all the trees that my dad and his brothers cut down, long before my time. They even used the boards from some of the trees to build our simple frame house.

Reading each other's minds, Peggy and I hurriedly gathered sticks and stones and made our way to the top of the rock. From there, we spied out the land and thwarted enemy attacks with the artillery we brought with us.

As the sun reached its peak, our stomachs began to rumble, and our strength began to wane.

Trying to conceal her weariness, Peggy relied on a more acceptable excuse for a break. "Hey, I think it must be lunchtime. Doncha think?"

I agreed, and we started up the hill to the house; even soldiers have to take lunch breaks.


Pat Nelson
October 22, 2009
Tweaked for Punctuation September 26, 2011

Word Count: 434