The Reindeer Keeper

My mother used to tell me about the times she'd hear me playing on the sun porch or in the front room with my two friends. That was when we lived in the house on the lane before we moved out to the country. I really loved that house on the lane. It had a back stairway leading down from my  bedroom and the kitchen had a very high counter where I remember watching a tadpole turn into a frog inside a glass fish bowl sitting on top of it. From the back steps off the sun porch was a flagstone patio that my father and grandfather created with the help of the cement they mixed inside an old wheelbarrow. Beyond the patio was an intriguing backyard of shrubs and lilac bushes and trees. It was the biggest backyard in the neighborhood so it was the backyard all the neighborhood kids played in except for those two friends my mother heard me talking to on the sun porch or in the front room. That's because those two friends were my imaginary friends. Their names were Chunnie and Winnie.

Running alongside and circling behind our grandparents' farmhouse was a cinder driveway. It made for a great race track until going so fast on your bike you couldn't slow down in time to take the curve and you'd find yourself crashing into the field or our grandmother's peony bushes. To this day I still have cinders in my knees. Lining the other side of the driveway were tall poplar trees. They were mighty. Proudly they stood through the rain and snow. And when the wind blew, their leaves sang a most amazing song that remains my favorite of all the needles and leaves singing when the wind pushed its way through them. While pine trees seemed to hum, those poplar trees sang a ghoulish, rustling tune and no other night was more ghoulish than Halloween as that wind seemed to orchestrate those leaves into the spookiest, creepiest, gut-wrenching, fearful, eerie, whaling scream that made us run through the fields splintered in streaks of moonlight-trick or treating at ligh

When growing up in the country and playing in the abandoned chicken coop turned into our Girls' Clubhouse which later included one male cousin, we had a Girls' Club Pledge-vowing to be faithful, fair, good, kind, and considerate. I wonder if we realized what all those words really meant. But that didn't mattter. Our pledge was part of our play as was the reciting of a fun little poem which I still recite in my head because whenever we'd recite it-it made us laugh. It now makes me smile. I think my favorite cousin wrote it. She was quite clever and it went like this: "Bees make honey-They make it so funny-You'd think they'd say it's a funny day-But it's not-It's not even Hot-That's what they'd say!"    I love little poems like that little poem. And over the years I've loved writing them whenever the mood hits. Writing such riddles and rhymes gets me back to those days when our biggest worries were whether of not we'd be

Childhood is a time of Wonder and Curiosity of even the smallest things. Growing up in the country, my cousins and I were provided endless opportunities for both. There was a creek full of suckers where our rafts made from telephone poles took us on journeys around the world; an old barn whose hay lofts provided us cover from evil doers; an abandoned chicken coop turned into a clubhouse filled with old desks, chalkboards, and books and so much more feeding our imaginations every single day we went outside to play-and that was most every day.  I love this picture of my granddaughter as she discovers water in the birdbath. I find myself wondering what she is thinking of that stuff trickling down her little fingers. Does she wonder what makes that stuff move when she splashes it around? Does she even notice that it takes her breath away when her splashing becomes nonstop and her face and hair and everything she is wearing becomes soaking wet yet despite it all it's so much fun tha