📃 Yard Swimming

Yeah, I hear you saying "that's a strange title for a post."

It is, isn't it?

It might make sense here in a couple of minutes, if you'll just give me a bit of time to get the words down on bits and bytes.

I will be doing a bit of jumping around time for my childhood slash growing up posts, really it all just kind of depends on what pops into my head at certain times. Along with whatever memories I can manage to actually keep track of throughout the course of time.

It's not easy, sometimes.

Growing up in a small, unincorporated town in South East Kansas did come with some good times for me. Believe it or not. We lived in Riverton, which as its namesake is actually alongside a river. We had a coal burning electric plant (long since shut down), a pretty decent school, a small post post office, and the World Famous Spring River Inn. Whether or not it was actually world famous is, of course, up for debate. They did have some damn good homemade cinnamon rolls though - those things were ginormous.

As I had indicated in a previous post, we lived on a corner lot in a relatively small, moderately friendly neighborhood. I had a couple of friends that lived across the street and would spend a lot of time over at thier home, playing with whatever was available at the time. They had a pretty large side yard and back yard - complete with woods and a large corn field. I'll have some stories about that corn field later, but not today.

One feature of our neighborhood was that the interior lots (of which our house was on one) had really large ditches on the edge of the property. Another feature is that, since our town was situated on a river, the land had a tendency towards being water logged and easily flooded.

You could probably extrapolate at least partly where this is going now.

One year we had quite the torrential rain.

There was one home in the neighborhood, on the other end from our home, who had an exceptionally large section of yard next to their house. It was also quite depressed from the road.

Now, fortunately for this homeowner, from what I recall it was only the yard itself that was pretty low and the actual house was elevated enough to prevent any water damage. There definitely could have been the opportunity for flood damage, here, because the entire side yard was basically turned into a small lake for us neighborhood kids to frolic around in for a day or so.

And frolic we did! I don't remember how many of us there were, probably 10 or more, but it was a great distraction from whatever was going on during those times. There was a storm tube that was beneath the road, and I remember us riding our bikes off that sucker and tumbling off into the water. It was a good time.

I don't know how many kids I watched bike off that, to be flipped over their handlebars because the lip of the metal storm tube was bent up. Even I had to experience that one, for some reason or other. It was fun, though.

I drove back through there decades later. It didn't look nearly as large as memory served, but that doesn't change the experience we had. The memories will remain, and the memories will always be fond for me.

This is post 81/100 of my #100DaysToOffload posts. You can read the other posts in this series here.

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