Childhood meme

I have been tagged by Wired JAFA for a meme.

Name 5 things you miss about your childhood

At first I thought it would be easier to write about five things I don't miss about my childhood, but I'm an optimist. I knew I could find five things I miss, eventually. And I did.

1. Fruit. My father had a farm, and when I was about five he planted an orchard, so I grew up with fruit. In season I ate peaches as if they cost nothing, which they did. I ate peaches galore. Peaches were my favourite, but I also ate plums and apricots and cherries and nectarines and apples apples apples. I ate and ate and ate fruit. Fruit was my candy, and there were a zillion different varieties of everything. My father planted about 10 different varieties of each fruit because he didn't want everything ripening at once and creating a fruit-picking crisis. We could never eat too much fruit. We had citrus trees at home, too, for domestic consumption. Also tree tomatoes, feijoa trees, a crab apple tree, grapes, Chinese gooseberries (later renamed Kiwi), gooseberries, strawberries, boysenberries, a few other berries, and watermelons. I've probably forgotten a few.

These days fruit costs the earth. I have never become used to paying for fruit. It was bad enough in NZ, when I left home - I had never paid for fruit in my life - but then I came here and was devastated by peaches that cost their weight in gold. AND WHY CAN'T YOU BUY FRESH APRICOTS IN JAPAN?

2. Parents. Having parents was nice. Grandparents, too.

3. Living in a HUGE HOUSE.

4. The lack of clutter. I didn't have as much clutter as I have now. I just didn't collect clutter the way I do now. I am a pack rat. The older I get the more clutter I have.

5. Swimming in the river behind the farm. Swimming in the river was one of my favourite things. Working on the orchard was one of my least favourite things (aside from eating more fruit than we picked, and driving the tractor), but lunchtime was great. We'd take the tractor and two-wheeled trailer down to the river and back the trailer up over the deep part of the river. (This was the 'swimming hole,' which changed position every year and sometimes required some tricky maneuvering.) Then we'd take running jumps off the trailer into the water. We'd stay down there for an hour or two (until Dad turned up on another tractor, to call us back, irritably) and we'd always end up with a bunch of picnicking strangers also jumping off our trailer. People - adults and children - always asked nicely, and although I sometimes got a bit annoyed at having to line up to jump off our own trailer I never mentioned this because it made me proud, too. We had the most fun set-up of anybody. Nobody else brought their own diving board to the river.

Sometimes, happily, we'd get sidetracked from fruit-picking work by somebody who'd stupidly got their car stuck in the gravel down by the river, trying to park their car too close. That was fun, too, because Dad usually sent one of the kids down to get them out. Adults get SO EMBARRASSED when they're being towed out of their foolish driving mistake by a nine-year-old on a tractor. Also, it makes them nervous. This is enormously entertaining for the nine-year-old.



The rules:

Remove the #1 item from the following list, bump everyone up one place and add your blog's name in the #5 spot. You should link to these urls - which means that this could take a while. (YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.) You see, this is a meme with a built-in trap. You click on the links so you can get the urls, and then you start reading, and the next thing you know you've missed dinner!

Fistful of Fortnights
Feisty Repartee
Chaos Theory
Wired JAFA
Bad Aunt

Then pass the meme on...

Lippy didn't say how many people to pass it on to, but she chose four, so I will too.

I'm choosing four people from four different parts of the world: Cheryl, Wikkachicky, Berlin Bear and Lynnchan (although I'm not sure if she's old enough to have fond memories of childhood yet).






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