Me as a kid - Part 1

Some of you may have seen the first few posts before. They were previously posted on Facebook in the notes section but this is more fun and I hate an empty page.  I figured this would be a good way to start.

by Greg Stier on Monday, February 15, 2010 at 11:08pm

When I was little there was very little to worry about. We wandered in the woods. We threw rocks, shot bottles, rode bicycles, and swam in the creek. If I added up all the hills and valleys I climbed as a kid, Everest would seem short. It was a wonderful childhood.
I had company in sisters. There were three people around at any given time to fight, tease, scare, or disgust. I also had a little brother but he got poked and teased by the sisters, so I didn't have that responsibility.
I was an awkward kid, like most kids. I didn't really know where I fit in but I had a few friends and we had fun. My best friend Stephen and I spent a lot of time wearing a rut between each others houses. He was a real farm kid, with real farm animals.
I liked to go to his house and help. I saw calves and piglets birthed, pigs castrated, fed motherless calves, and rode horses. It was a blast. 
We weren't real farm kids.  We just lived in the country.  We did have rabbits, but not the kind you could name and get friendly with. People came by to pick up dinner on a regular basis.
To be fair we had a pony for a short while. It came with the house. Sugar was his name and he seemed very big in my memories until I saw a picture of my father astride him. Dad was six feet tall and the picture shows his feet hanging about six inches off the ground. It's amazing what perspective can change. Sugar disappeared like several of our animals seemed to. I don't remember when. I must have blinked. It makes me wonder how much I missed as I drifted around in my little kid world.
Some things you never forget though. I remember putting on our oldest tennis shoes, cut off jean shorts and old t-shirts to swim at Anderson falls. There was a huge chunk of rock in the stream and we would climb it and jump, climb it and jump, climb it and jump... There were crawdads to catch, the falls to walk behind if it had rained recently, sand on the shore to dig and pile. Sometimes we would bring huge inner tubes from tractor tires and take a lazy ride down the creek to the bridge near the house. Frequent stops were mandatory. The minnows must be chased and, if you caught a crawdad, so must the sisters. If the crawdad caught you, it wasn't quite as fun, but the sisters liked it better.
The bridge near the house was a big metal truss affair which eventually received a wooden floor when the metal one rotted out too bad. If the creek was deep enough, we would hang from the under-structure and drop the ten or fifteen feet into the water. The carp that swam in the shade of the bridge would scatter downstream for a while until we left their lazy resting place.
When I wasn't in the creek, I was in the woods. Dad and Mom owned fifteen acres, half of it hills. I wandered every inch of it at one point or another. All the neighbors had the same kind of properties so we would take off on hikes across the country, no destination in mind and get there in plenty of time.
When I was thirteen, Dad got a Honda dirt bike from a guy at work and I spent the next three years pretty much riding that wonderful death trap. Stephen had one too and we tore up the woods making tracks. We would climb the steep hills to see if we could make it to the top or if the motorcycle would end on top of us. We went mudding in the swamp, crossed creeks, raced, and drove on the road when we shouldn't have.
At one point, I built a ramp, and boy, was it a ramp! I could get thirty or forty feet of air time on that thing. Stephen was pretty impressed but forgot to pull up his front tire. He got thirty or forty feet of road rash. Luckily the road was field dirt and not asphalt but he still limped for a bit and he was done with the ramp.
The motorcycle was my baby till I turned sixteen and got the Vette, Chevette that is, or in the parlance of the day a sh*tvette.

To be continued...