“I smell the river!” This boast from one of the several pre-teens headed to Cedar Grove in the early 1960s gave that 10- or 12-year-old bragging rights until the next Sunday’s after church foray.
The siblings and cousins spent much of their rural lives together. Working on neighboring farms, attending the same country school. Spending nights at each other’s homes.
A “bunch of us” as they now recall; they numbered as many as a dozen at times. Seldom less than half that number.
This was when play parties and pie suppers were the highlights of the social calendar. Horseshoes and marbles, homemade stilts and hoop-n-sticks were boys’ and girls’ entertainment.
Lightning bugs in a bottle at night. June bugs on a string in the afternoon. Grasshoppers on a hook under a bobber in a farm pond.
