Growing up

[Cassia]

ImaginaryDay2 was talking about the area around which he lives and it got me thinking. I grew up in that area and near my place was a field that was covered in pheasants during the summer. So much so that the tractors would ruin nests and mother pheasants that tried to protect them. Now the frogs even are gone.

What was the place like that you grew up in?

 

[Andrew]

I grew up in a packed trailer park, the ac sweat collecting under the houses made for an abundance of amphibian life
The street curbs where high and the area was at low altitude so when the rain came we got are kicks by collecting crawfish from the streets... those were the days

 

[Cassia]

I grew up in a packed trailer park, the ac sweat collecting under the houses made for an abundance of amphibian life
The street curbs where high and the area was at low altitude so when the rain came we got are kicks by collecting crawfish from the streets... those were the days

I remember the crawdad too lol further up the mountains from there. Woods Lake

 

[NewCreation435]

I lived in a subdivision that was only about five blocks when we first moved in and grew to over 20 blocks of houses. I remember riding my bike to elementary school every morning. The school was five blocks away. Most of the kids in the neighborhood did that. I have fond memories of being on the neighborhood swim team also

 

[Ruth]

I grew up in a then semi-rural area that had very few stores, parking lots and there were houses and large fields we'd play in. There was a church we all would go to. We hiked to school in the snow and it sure toughened us up.

 

[Lamb]

I grew up in the suburbs where there were a LOT of kids on our block!! My friends and I would walk to the library by ourselves to check out bags of books because the town was safe to live in at the time.

We had a pond where there were tadpoles and snakes and the kids would all be playing around there. Now there are homes built all over where there used to be wildlife.

 

[Krissy Cakes]

In my neighborhood we would play at each others houses. Mainly my house. It was the "fun" house. I have young parents so the kids loved it.

 

[tango]

I grew up in a sleepy little village where nothing much ever happened. You didn't dare blink, in case something did happen and you missed it.

The village is much the same now except that of the three local stores two are now closed. The post office closed, as is depressingly common in villages, and there's now a post office counter at the nearby grocery store. The local bakery closed down because the owners retired and for some reason their children didn't want to carry on a business that involved getting up at 3am to bake the bread in the hope of selling it during the day.

On a nearby road there were lots of very small houses slowly falling apart as they were owned by elderly people who couldn't afford to maintain them or their gardens. I remember one such house owned by an older woman who had six-foot weeds growing across most of her front yard. She couldn't understand why none of the local teenagers would cut them back for her - she'd even offered to pay for the help. The trouble was she had no idea of the amount of work involved or a fair price for the work. I remember hearing her say "I'd give them 50p for their efforts, it's not as if I want it for free". At the time 50p was about $0.80 and even though this was in the late 1980s you'd still struggle to find a teenager interested in doing what was probably going to several hours of quite hard work for less than a dollar. Anyway, as the older folks died or moved into nursing homes their old shacks were bought up and demolished, with nice new houses being built in their place. Some of those houses had a lot of land too.

 

[Cassia]

The area that I now live has closed too but to make room for expansion. They have built accommodation for 300000 people within the farmlands so the bread basket of the country is quickly becoming covered in tar and cement. Build and they will come is the mantra and it seems feasible to achieve but leaves other areas vacant and ghost towns.

I was watching a film on Mexico tho and the climates of both areas that share the range of the Monarch butterfly have similar things happening so kinda sorta watching from a higher plane that doesn’t feign existence.