Mountains to Cotton Fields.

A walk through my childhood....

I can honestly say that I had a great childhood. I was born and raised for ten and a half years in a small village in New York. It was home to dairy farms and apple orchards.

Okay so that barn looks a little dilapidated. That's because it is, but when I was a kid, the fields were green, the barn was in better shape, and black and white holstein cows dotted the pastures.

I have one older brother. We are only a year and a half apart so I always had someone to play with growing up. Though I did, indeed, like Barbies, Breyer horses and Legos were MY passion.

Now, if you didn't like Legos...what's wrong with you? I remember the Lego kits - the real ones? The ones where you actually had to find a miniscule piece in an ocean of rainbow colors to put in just the right spot, or the suspension of the firetruck just wasn't right. Now it seems like Lego kits are these massive parts you throw together in five minutes. What's the fun in that? I can still be found in Dawsonville at the Outlet Mall at the Lego store....playing with Legos in the back with the kids.

When we weren't playing Legos around the house, we were outside riding bikes, hiking up and down the hill in the back, playing whiffle ball, fishing at the pond across the street, and just being good kids.

Around 1987 or so, my parents bought my brother the original NES (Nintendo Entertainment System for you non-gaming folks). The first game we had? Top Gun. I was great at it...except for landing on the aircraft carrier. I think that's the downfall of the game for most people. My brother? landed on it every time. I wonder if I could land on it now?

We then got....Mario Bros., Legend of Zelda, Gyromite, and some others. I think a first date question to see if you and the person are going to get along is ask, "what color was the game cartridge for the first Legend of Zelda game on NES?" If the person professes to be a "gamer" (right after you said you were), they should definitely know the answer to this question.

My brother had his friends, I had mine, but we both had each other. Some of our favorite games to play (that we now realize are dangerous!)

1) I hold the match while my brother shoots WD-40 at it...seeing how big the flame gets.

2) Play with spray paint in the garage with our gloves on, gloves covered in spray paint, we're smart enough to "wash our hands" with gasoline to get the paint off, questioned by mom, "have you been playing with spray paint again?" No...we answer...ourselves just smelling horribly like gasoline, and our gloves covered in red spray paint. I guess that's what they mean by "caught red-handed."

3) We had blacktop driveways in NY. When it rained, shortly thereafter, or when it was sprinkling, we would get my Pop's oil cans (similar to that of the Tin Man in Wizard of Oz) and put drops and puddles of oil all over the driveway because we liked the cool colors.

4) Planning our "great escape." Does every kid do this? Does every kid plan their running away plan? We never carried it out, and I have no idea why we wanted to do so, but we were very diligent in planning:

* Take the dog

* Take toilet paper

* Take a gallon of milk (we weren't thinking about refrigeration)

* Take a long stick that was sharpened at the end for fishing, etc.

* Run away to Amish Country

Okay so the last one - didn't make sense to me either, but we vacationed there one time, and it seemed like "the place" to runaway to. If we had done so, chances are I wouldn't even know what the internet was let alone a "blog."

One of our favorite places to vacation was "Cape May, NJ." It is the southernmost tip of New Jersey. We would count down at the end of the Garden State Parkway......threeeeeee.....twoooooooo......onnnnneeee.......CAPE MAY! Since Cape May was the zero mile marker. We spent our time in an older beachhouse, but to us it was perfect. I'd walk down to the bay with my "aunt" (a family friend, not relative) and walk along the beach past the washed up Horseshoe Crabs singing the Smothers Brothers' "Crabs walk sideways.....and lobsters walk straight" while interchangeably walking sideways...and straight. It was the little things like that that I remember most.

Our days were spent on the beach among Victorian homes and arcades on the boardwalk. My brother and I would make sloppy sand (mixing dry sand with water and then dripping it from between our fingers), and we would always play in the ocean and ride the waves.

That's me, the hottie, in a pose I probably saw in a Spiegel catalog.

We would go to Wildwood in the evening - Morey's pier. Piers filled with amusement park rides, arcades, and shops. We would sneak handfuls of free samples at the Fudge Kitchen at the Washington Square Mall, and we ALWAYS rode the horse and carriage (of course).

Our mom and dad stayed together. Our village was small. Everyone knew everyone. When the new Burger King came to town, my brother and I would walk about 2 miles on our downtown and get two milkshakes and then walk back home (with our parents' permission). The town was a firefighting town. Almost everyone was a volunteer firefighter including our dad. Our grandparents lived downstairs in our house (mother in law suite) when they weren't in Florida. Pop took me for rides on his red scooter. Nan had tea parties with me.

Around 1990 or so, the plant where my dad worked was closing, and we had to find another place to live and another job for my dad. He ended up looking at a job in Georgia. Now, my representation of Georgia was hoop skirts, plantation homes, and horses. But when I stepped off the prop job plane onto the tarmack in Dougherty County, Georgia, a small black thing kamikaze'd into my eyeball....my first introduction to the South was a gnat.

Moving to South Georgia was a shock. I wasn't that upset when we moved. To me, it was an adventure. The fact that I couldn't understand anybody was, however, a little frustrating. "White beaches" were actually "white benches." "Windy" was "Wendy," a "Pin" was either a "Pin" or a "Pen." When someone said, "HEY!" I turned around and asked, "What?" I was introduced to tree frogs, "skinks," alligators, alligator snapping turtles, and the ever-present gnats. Nature's small fleet of kamikaze airmen who would make your nose, eyeballs, mouth, and ears their primary targets of destruction.

I can't complain. There are some good people there. My Summers went from spending time at the beach in New Jersey to playing out on the lake on a pontoon boat...swimming under the pontoons and hanging out under the boat. Quail season meant quail fries in the evening spitting out buckshot every once in awhile. Horseback riding on Jimmy Carter's property in Plains, Georgia.

We always tried to do things as a family. On Saturday afternoons, it became a tradition to go ave dinner, change clothes, go to mass at church, on the way home, stop at the video store, rent a video or two and get our free popcorn that they popped there.

Around 1996, things changed abruptly. Earlier, my dad started losing hearing in one ear so he went and had it checked out and was diagnosed with a benign brain tumor in the occipital area of the brain (near the ear). It was called an Acoustic Neuroma. Long story short, while the operation was successful at removing the tumor, it had really taken its toll on my dad. CHF (Congestive Heart Failure), meningitis, etc. There was a time where we were all praying - including community members - for my dad.

At that time, my brother was on the swim team. It was getting close to Christmas. Kids could get out of detention if they brought two cans of food. My parents had been in Atlanta nearly three months straight while we were home alone. We had various teachers and some parents we didn't know making meals for my brother and I and bringing them over. Chili, lasagna, spaghetti, soup, desserts. They brought over paper plates and cups and napkins and utensils s we didn't have to cook. My French teacher gave my brother and I some money to order pizza one night and gave me a hug. Maybe they knew something we didn't, but we thought dad was "fine" and going to be "fine." As Christmas approached, my brother and I decided to set up the Christmas tree and decorate the house for when my parents came home from the hospital from one of many of our dad's surgeries to fix or try to fix the damage that had been done.

We got the tree down, we decorated. I remember going out the back door near our garage and finding a box of things by the door. They were presents for Shane and I - socks, shirts, and some other things. An unsigned Christmas card tucked in the box.

Our parents came home from Atlanta to a decorated house, and I think it really made them happy. Dad was in bed, and that's where Dad would stay, in excrutiating pain from debilitating headaches that Demerol couldn't touch. My parents were afraid of losing their house due to the rising costs of medical bills.

There was a knock at the door. When we answered it, the swim team coach and her daughter were there. They had boxes and boxes of items for us, and they walked in. The food....the canned food that they had collected for "needy families" were for us since our groceries were minimal. They came in with stockings full of gifts for Shane and I and handed my mom some checks that people had written in the community. We had mall gift certificates and other things. It was a good Christmas, and I am thankful to this day to the community in Lee County, Georgia for all that they did for us that year.

A few years later, my mom prayed that my dad would be okay after slipping into Congestive Heart Failure from the steroids he was on for his head. The next moring, he woke up, pain free. Since then my dad will get headaches every once in awhile when he overdoes something and is down and out on Demerol in the bed, but not nearly as bad as he was.

When we got through that rough part in time, our childhood was over. Shane went to college and worked for the DoD. I went off to college in Dahlonega.

But I can honestly say, that we had the best childhood one could ever want.