You’d be surprised just how far you can fling an apple this way, some of them would sail several hundred feet. Eventually, everyone would join in and we’d have a huge apple war with each person finding a team and attacking each other. These apples would sting you pretty bad if they hit you so you learned real fast to take cover. It was a very fun way to pass the humid summer evenings on the mountain.
Another game we played was bows and arrows. We’d craft a crude bow out of a hickory sapling and a piece of bailing twine. We’d use goldenrod weeds for arrow by stripping off the leaves from the stalk. We’d shoot these arrows at different things, and later on when we got bicycles, we’d make a gauntlet of sorts, where one person would ride their bicycles through a group of people with bows, the object was for the bow shooters to shoot into the spokes of your bicycle and wreck you, but usually that never happened, usually the bicycle wheel would throw the goldenrod back out.
We weren’t allowed to use real wood for our arrows because when Dad was little, he was playing bows and arrows with the kids his age and he accidentally shot my Uncle Fudgy in the eye with a stick arrow, it nearly put his eye out and even to this day, Fudgy has a slight squint in his one eye. That didn’t affect is much since Goldenrod was more plentiful and worked just fine for us anyway.
3 comments:
Sounds like good times!
Another entertaining post....
Matthew, the things you describe are so like the things my sons did growing up. I like the details you add--like which trees you were allowed to use.
What you're doing is capturing a time and place for a generation of mountain children. Good on you.
Post a Comment