My forest was better than a play house for a little girl in the early 1970s. When my friends would come over we would go to the forest and spend hours amongst those trees. We played make-believe and pretended we were everything from princesses to famous movie stars in hiding. In the summertime we would pick berries along the edge of the road, and when it rained the rain sometimes made a little creek that flowed through the middle of my forest. Sometimes we even packed a picnic lunch as we set off on another great adventure. Anything was possible with our imaginations.
The back side of my forest was our property line. The front side ran along the road. The right side made the border between the “pasture” and our house while the left side made the border between my forest and the rest of the land. Sometimes on the “rest of the land” my parents would plant a garden, but most of the time it was just open land. One of the things I remember most about my forest though is that left side edge of the trees. In the springtime, it became one giant wall of honeysuckle. It made everything around it smell Heavenly, and the bees didn’t seem to mind sharing this wall with us. So no matter what adventure my friends and I went on when we went to the forest, if the honeysuckle was blooming we would spend what seemed like hours standing and picking those blooms just to pull the ends off and get that little drop of sweet nectar. You knew to look for the snowy white soft blooms because the slightly yellowed ones were not as plump with the “honey.” I still think of those woods when I smell or see honeysuckle vines today.
Kids today don’t seem to have these same opportunities. Video games have taken their imaginations and the need to fill every hour with extra activities leaves precious little time to just be a kid. We should let kids enjoy their childhoods. After all, everyone deserves childhood memories as sweet as mine in My Honeysuckle Forest.
#childhood #make-believe #play #imagination #memories #kid fun
