Waxing Nostalgic

I've been planning to post today about a sewing project I just completed.  But I read this post at Thrifty Décor Chick and it really got me thinking.  I'm not going to lie, mince words, or apologize for what I believe, I'm just going to say it.  My childhood was better than yours.  Ha!  Seriously though, I had an idyllic childhood.  And here's why I think that.  It involved horses and haymows and kittens. 

It involved inner tubes and rope swings and tree houses.  It included gardening and haying and making maple syrup.

 It involved skating on a frozen pond and swimming in rivers.  It involved frog races and gathering eggs.  It was a close relationship with my rain-bonnet-and-house-coat- wearing-grandmother.  It was mountain climbing in the Adirondacks and donning swimsuits to play in a summer rainstorm.  It was searching for kittens in the haymow and playing hide and seek on a warm summer night.  It was tree climbing and sour wild apples and wild spearmint.

 It was catching crayfish in the Big Brook and cousins who were more like siblings.

 It was milking cows and scratching pig backs.  It was jumping in huge leaf piles and playing in the pasture until Dad's whistle called us home.  It was picking berries, cutting green beans, and wrapping meat.  It was fields of daisies, sledding the pasture hill, and catching bullfrogs.  It was scrimping to take a family vacation, sharing bedrooms and eating casseroles.  It was campfire sing-alongs, fishing for bullhead in the pond, and going to school with the same kids for 13 years.  It was having parents who taught me about faith, moral uprightness, and integrity.  I am infinitely grateful for the experiences of my youth, for the day to day simplicity of my childhood, made magical by the combination of freedom to be a child and the expectation to make a contribution to the family effort.
And so I got to thinking, I am brimming with nostalgia, memories, stories that I love sharing.  So I'm going to be self-indulgent and start sharing them here.  Flashback Fridays perhaps?  Come along if you want, but either way I'll be here. ;)