I worked with a group of kids last night that had energy that filled the room. It was really enjoyable. This morning I found myself appreciating how kids create their own worlds and rules for play, and how they don’t think much about getting hurt.
My thoughts led me back to how reckless I was growing up—and as I leaned into that feeling these times I got hurt just kind of tumbled out. I cannot explain how I never broke any bones, but here we are. I laughed out loud trying to put them in words. Please enjoy. And don’t let your kids try these things at home.
The Parachute
When I was a little kid we used to go to gym class at UW-Stevens Point for an hour or so on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I think it was their PE majors learning to teach kids as their practical, but I’m honestly not sure what the deal was. What I do know is that the entire UWSP gyms and fields were filled with groups of kids from various schools and homeschools led by college-age students that we looked up to and loved. I hope they still do it. My siblings and I would walk or bike as a group from our house. I feel like I remember pulling a wagon with us, but that could be false since we were all old enough to be there. Anyways, I remember a lot of little pieces from gym class: cartwheels on balance beams, bean bag games, intense tag, snippets of flag football.
But the day I fell off the parachute. . . it was gorgeous outside. Our group leader, Dennis, grabbed one of those rainbow parachutes and we jogged out to the field. Our coordinated little hands were enough to balloon it up and bring it back down pretty seamlessly. Somehow a couple of us convinced Dennis to let us get ON the parachute—LOLLL can you imagine that happening today? Of course it was me that went up in the air at an outward angle outside the area where I’d land on the parachute and landed on the ground instead. I remember Dennis just running toward me as I fell out of the sky. I think that’s the first time I really recall getting the wind knocked out of me and everyone just being so stunned—game over. Poor Dennis. He was so worried that he walked home with us to tell my mom and make sure I was fine. The next class he had gotten me this little beanie baby elephant; I was a-okay.
The Pulley System
I’ll argue that the first eight of us kids had the most adventurous times. Our back yard was like something straight out of the movie Hook. The woods were thick, and we (99.9% the boys) had built an entire city called DeSchmitt. I could be making this up but my understanding is that the name was because most of the building materials were from he Schmitt’s backyard junk/burn pile. One of my brothers had wired electricity into his house, another sold pancakes off a camping griddle some mornings and another another used an old rabbit hutch as his own where he tried to replicate the pancake sales by talking us younger ones into buying root beers and grape soda. I was always slightly jealous that my brothers had cool tree forts that I wasn’t really part of, and there might still be a 2×4 nailed between two trees where I independently decided I was going to build the girls a tree house but got frustrated because my sisters just wanted to read books.
Anyways, my brothers had built this impressive hodgepodge treehouse with three or four base levels that had one of those old metal pulley contraptions with a climbing rope tied out to a tree at the bottom. I had watched my brothers use the system for awhile, but I was too chicken to use it. I finally decided one day while my brothers were in school I’d do it. I climbed up, debated it for awhile, took a deep breath and jumped. And fell. Straight to the dirt. WHY someone had untied the pulley from the top is still an unsolved mystery. It was definitely painful, but I was a-okay.
The town hall that my grandpa Crawford built is the only structure in the woods that’s survived the years to this day. And, on the note of grandpa Crawford, the background on the sides of this blog is one of his paintings that I have in my office now after his passing. Love ya, gpa.
The Toboggan Wagon
If I’m looking out our front porch on Union Street—where I grew up for the most part—we have the Boyer house next to the south yard and then my grandpa Klein on the other side.
On this day of play we must’ve recently watched Cool Runnings, a move about the Jamaican bobsled team, because a few of us had this radio flyer wagon out and the mission was to get from the top of my grandpa’s driveway to the top of the Boyer house driveway and then course reverse—two people pushing, one in the wagon steering. The boys had done a few successful runs before it was my turn, but when I got behind that handle to steer I just remember coming down the Boyer driveway too fast, or I pulled the right corner too fast, but either way I came FLYING out of that wagon. I don’t remember much about skidding across the concrete, but I wore a bandage across half my face for quite some time. Other than that just a couple scrapes on my arms and legs, but I was a-okay. The Klein kids did not learn from this incident. Our driveway in Jamaica has a hill with a gradual curve in it and the littles definitely continued using the wagon as a toboggan when mom and dad were in town. Kids, ya know?
The Trap Door
First, you must know that growing up in our house around dinner time someone yelled “time to eat” both up the stairs and out the back door to call in the kids from the woods. If we were all outside and employing selective hearing my mom would ring this massive swinging bell in the garden so there were no excuses and everyone knew it was time to come in for dinner. Second, you must know that there’s a trap door to a cellar at the bottom of the upstairs steps. Which, you have to imagine as super steep farmhouse steps that you can only run up and down if you live there. This trap door at the bottom of the steps leads into the cellar that goes under the house, but it’s also where we store all of the canned goods and other vegetables and such from the garden. Ergo, trips into the cellar were frequent around time to prep for dinner.
One summer while my dad redid the flooring in their room he took that trap door off its hinges to work around it. The general rule for going into the cellar is that you call “hole’s open” up the stairs, take the door out of the floor and lean it against the door to the stairwell to block it from opening. One day someone had called upstairs that it was time to eat but between then and when I came down another person opened the cellar without yelling “hole’s open” and they also propped the door against my parents bed instead of the stairwell, leaving the hole literally open. When I come running down and pushed the stairwell door open I literally just kept going because there was nothing under my feet. I screamed and blacked out on the way down. When I woke up my mom was beside me in the cellar and there were faces above me—I think it took a minute to register what happened but we just got up and ate dinner; I was a-okay. I’m not sure if that door is on it’s hinges to this day (a nod to all the unfinished projects in our house), but this is an ongoing practice in the Klein household.
The Ground Bees
While one of my older brothers was on deployment, two of my siblings and I created this “military” obstacle course in our back yard. It was simple: run, scale some wood piles, crawl under some fences and then sprint up this little mound and jump into one of the storm runoff ditches we dug for the garden. By the time my brother and I were headed up the mound we were neck and neck scratching and pulling each other back and we jumped into the ditch at the same time. So here we are, laughing so hard we can’t move when this buzzing just growls up from around us and clouds out every other natural sound. Before we could move I yelled, “bees!” And being so chocked up with laughter climbing out over each others limbs felt like it was happening in slow motion. Did you know that ground bees will chase you? I feel like I cannot express this accurately enough: we laugh-cry-yelled the entire time we sprinted to the house and I did not care where my brother was—if he fell there was not a 1% chance I was going to stop and help (it was fine, he was right behind me). We learned that day to check the ditches for ground bees and that my brother is highly allergic in large quantities. If this was the Hunger Games I was the absolute opposite of the Katniss saving Peta from the tracker jackers. I had some minor reactions, but I was a-okay. This is a fond memory between us as adults.
Bonus: The Sea Urchin
When we lived in Jamaica I’d frequently swim out to a bed of seaweed and come up from a dive with a sea urchin in my hand. They’re really weird creatures. The ones with white spikes aren’t poisonous—they kind of cling to your hand like a suction cup and you can feel them latching on. It’s how they stay in place. Creepy, but definitely interesting. Anyways, on occasion my brother and I would chase my sister(s?) around with sea urchins while swimming, which I am certain was terrifying for her. I feel like the only way to really be hurt by one is if you put too much pressure on it, so this a simple story of karma. I must have been in 5th or 6th grade—there were a bunch of us headed toward the end of the beach where the waves crashed hard on this circular pier that we liked to explore around. I was running kind of in the water and didn’t see the urchin that had been knocked near the shore. I stepped on it and crumpled down with louds shriek. It was SO painful and the spikes were so deep and thin my mom picked every single one out with tweezers, but I was a-okay.
IF you’ve heard me recall one of these in person you know they come with hand gestures, wide eyes and sometimes between great bouts of laughter and big smiles. The pain in three of these stories was completely avoidable, but the other three were just from living life. I’m grateful I got to play so hard, be so curious and to live with a sort of reckless abandon that kept me coming back fully willing to explore the edges after getting burned.
I 10/10 recommend this as a journal prompt to bring you laughs and build you up—maybe before taking a leap of faith or stepping into a situation that feels like a risk worth taking. We are really resilient, we can always start over, and I think it’s important to remember that.
Bangarang
// GLK
