I've been tagged! 5 Things You Miss About Childhood

Ok so I got tagged by Jenny for this MEME thing. I'll post this and see if I got it right. ANY FEEDBACK AND ADVICE IS WELCOME!

This is from "A woman Obsessed" 's blog: ( and I already added my name to the bottom.)
" Youth is Wasted on the Young!

I’ve been tagged for my first ever MEME! Yay! Meg tagged me for the “5 Things You Miss About Childhood” Meme, and I’m tagging Jeannie because she’s the only blogger I know in real life (other than Meg and the folks she already tagged!) and I'm curious to know what she has to say! We're both from Northern New Mexico, which is a wacky, fabulous place.

So here’s how this works: If you want to participate the chain-letter part works like this: remove the blog at #1 from the following list and bump every one up one place; add your blog’s name in the #5 spot; just check to make sure the links are still attached if you copy n' paste.

1. Ellen's Nest
2. The Farmette Report
3. Nepenthe's Misadventures
4. A Woman Obsessed
5. Jeannie's Hands at Work "


Here goes.

#1. I miss our house on Goad Avenue in Socorro, NM. We lived there from about 1958 to 1964. It was on a hill across from Campus Station (rd?, ave?) behind New Mexico Tech. There was a big deep arroyo between the tech houses and our house where my twin brother and I used to play. We had paths worn along the arroyo and forts where we kept our "treasures" - rocks and sticks and mummified lizards and other childhood prizes. I remember the almost skunky smell of creosote bushes in the heat of summer and the shade under their roots and the mesquite where we dug out the hillsides to make hidey holes and "stage coach stops."It would be cooler in under the roots and if you stuck your face out a little the heat would hit you in waves that felt like a dry teakettle boiling on the stove. We could sit in those stops for hours playing cowboys and indians, army, wilderness explorers. We had about a mile maybe of arroyo bed to run up and down in and still be within earshot of my house. I'm sure my mother could see us most of the time from our back patio or kitchen window. My brother and I were "desert rats" out all day long, only coming in for drinks, food, and afternoon tv: K Circle B with Dick Bills in Albuquerque (on KOB-TV 4 even back then )[- yes- there's a song, too!], and later Uncle Howdy & Thermo on Channel 7 (now known as Howard Morgan retired weathercaster and artist), and Uncle Billy on Channel 13.



#2. I miss the years my dad bought a horse and we had to get up at 5:30, 6:00 o'clock every morning in the summer to ride him. We kept him at a friend's house. The Goads lived over the hill to the south and east of us and had 2 horses and our horse Frosty stayed with them. My favorite smells of the early sunrise are hay and oats with molasses mixed with the tang of horse sweat, manure and corral dust. I smell that now and I'm back 45 years or more ago sitting on a bale of hay in the tack room- feed stall, patting Frosty's nose while he tries to knock me over to get to the food. :)

I miss my best friend growing up - Cece Goad - her dad had the corral. She had long black hair and was strong, tall and full of energy back then. She lives in Las Lunas and I've seen her husband over the years but not her in about 15 years.

#3. I miss our times in Cloudcroft. It was so different there. It wasn't hot like Socorro or big like Las Vegas, NM ( where I lived after '64). It was a sleepy little summer cabin village with not much to do but be with your family and visit and get to know your neighbors because THAT was what there was to do. My family would read books aloud after breakfast until it was time to walk downtown to the post office. In the early days you could take the back railroad beds that wound through the cabins like roads and never get on to the street till you got to the main road going through the center of town. After the mail, a stop at the grocery store for anything needed for lunch then home. After lunch, naps ( altitude gets you for a about a week!), crafts more reading, games and maybe going out to find and pick mushrooms, raspberries, elderberries, and sometimes chokecherries. We'd go to White Sands for picnics and the drive-in in Alamogordo for movies. The Lodge in Cloudcroft was right up the street and we'd walk up there for a fancy dinner at least once during the summer. My parents' friends were all so kind to my brother and me. We were often without kids our own age and expected to be in company of grown-ups A LOT. I think we learned so much from those times. I know kids today are not expected to interact with grown-ups the same way. I wonder if that's not too bad in the bigger picture?

I miss taking baths in the clawfoot tub in that cabin when you had to heat the water in the Ben Franklin stove for three hours before filling the tub. You really had to budget the water in order to have warm water to rinse your hair. It took at least a couple of hours of chopping and splitting wood to go in the stove to heat enough water. And it had to be kept going. If the fire went out in the afternoon the tank would cool oof, or if you washed the dishes first then you had to wait longer for the water to get hot again. (It really was fun ,then. Really... Honest.)

My friend, Vaughn Ward lived down the road in the cabin my family rented before we bought our own. Her family would try to get up in the summer from El Paso at the same time my family came from Socorro or later 'Vegas so that we girls wouldn't be completely bored. She had 2 brothers and I had one. We were joined at the hip for a lot of summers.I lost track of her after high school. She did stop by to see my folks one time in Cloudcroft. That must have been 20 years ago.

My mother died in her bed in our cabin the same week that Princess Diana died. I can never remember the date but I remember that.

#4. I miss getting our Christmas tree from the woods. My family did that more years than I can remember. I have pictures of us when we were little, crying because the tree got to ride on the sled on the way back to the car instead of us. Then later in Las Vegas, we used to tramp through the woods for miles before we found the right tree. It would be a day long project - breakfast and the long drive to the woods, hiking through the snow, up and down, on and on. Lunch usually a picnic near the tree to be cut down and the trek back.