Granny's button jar

Juliet was saying a few days ago that she was running out of ideas of things to do with Hannah now that she’s home with her all day. Which got me thinking about my own childhood and the things we did to keep us entertained.  This was long before the days of Smart phones and dvd’s and video games.  It was a simpler time..why I used to walk 20 miles in the snow…just kidding.  That was my dad’s line when we complained it was too cold to play outside.

There were no electronic cars, at least not in our realm.  The toys required our imagination to run them.  I remember spending hours playing cars with Jimmy and Garry.  We had an old rug that was multicolored and round.  And so each color became a road.  Jimmy would get out the encyclopedias (before Google) and we would stack them under the rug in various places to make hills.  Tupperware containers became buildings along the road.  We would make bridges out of Lincoln logs.  We would drive our little matchbox cars on the road and stop for gas and food along the way at our Tupperware buildings. 

When it was warm outside, we would spend hours building roads in the dirt on the side of the house.  Our version of Jurassic Park was the giant cottonwood beetles that would sometimes appear as we played.  I hated those things.  We would build tunnels and bridges in the dirt.  And spend hours happily moving our cars along our dirt paths. 

And when it rained, that brought on a whole other adventure.  We would all find a stick and race them along the curb, running along side our stick and cheering it on until it fell into the rain gutter.  Then we’d start all over again. 

We made our backyard version of Six Flags every summer with cardboard boxes, blankets and imagination.  An old couch sitting out in the backyard became a ride where you sat on it and were rocked back and forth by Jimmy and Garry until you fell backwards into the honeysuckle bush.  Still one of my favorite smells.  The wagon became a ride where you were pulled along a path of various obstacles including a bush where you were shot with a water gun, and a precarious cardboard and brick hill where you were pulled up to the top and then abandoned by the wagon puller to careen into a mud puddle.  We had arcade games where you knocked over coke bottles with a ball and shot at balloons with a dart and picked a floating duck out of the kiddie pool to win a prize.  And always the refreshment stand where for a nickel you could get a cup of Koolaid and a handful of vanilla wafers.  The neighborhood kids would come to our carnival and have a great time.

And in the late afternoon, right before our moms yelled that it as suppertime, we would play tag and hide and go seek, and red rover, and piggy piggy give a signal. And catch lightning bugs in baby food jars with holes poked in the top.

Sometimes on Sunday’s we would go to Wills Point to visit my mom’s mom who we called Granny.  Granny didn’t have ANY toys or games at her house.  An old black and white tv was the only luxury in her house.  But her backyard was a wonderland with white fence all around that we used to walk on top of like a balance beam as our siblings thru peaches from the peach trees at us trying to knock us off.  We would run down to the school yard a few blocks away and climb inside the unlocked school busses and play hide and seek.  We would carefully cross the highway to the railroad tracks and put pennies on them and then wait for a train to come and smash them.  And inside the house, in a drawer of her buffet that always smelled like bananas since she kept them on top in a bowl, was my favorite TOY.  A jar of buttons.  It wasn’t a huge jar, more like a mayo jar and inside were what seemed like hundreds of buttons.  I would dump them all out in a pile and sort them by size, or by color.  Or make pictures with them on the floor, making a button cat or a button flower.  Sometimes I would get one of her bowls out and play button toss.  When Granny died, I asked for the buffet and the button jar.  Sadly, I don’t know what happened to the button jar.  I suppose that somewhere along the way in one of our moves it got thrown out or lost.  What I wouldn’t give to have that button jar.  I’d give it to Hannah when she got a little older and show her how to sort them and make pictures with them.

I told Juliet that when I come down this week I will show her how to play library and grocery store and airport which were made up “games” my mom used to play with Chris and Andy.  Though I don’t think they have a treadmill to use as the luggage carousel. 😊 My mom would play with the boys for hours using only her imagination and magical things she had in her house like an ink stamper and index cards that she would put inside books so that they could be checked out at her “library”.  And can goods that she would take out and line the floor with so they could grocery shop and then be rang up at a pretend cash register with monopoly money to pay with.  The stairs became the airplane where the stewardess (her) would bring them snacks and have them buckle their seat belts which were real belts used to pretend.   When she was into her “jungle décor” phase,  playing Zoo was added to the list since she had elephants and giraffes and tigers and zebra statues to put in pretend cages made of plastic crates.

And always, always, you would eventually feel the house shaking and the stereo upstairs in her room blasting the song Rocky Top as the boys bounced freely up and down on her bed to the beat, trying to touch the ceiling with their hands as they bounced.  I’m surprised to this day that no broken bones came from this.

What I hope most to give Hannah and eventually Arthur is the gift of imagination.  I want them to experience the wonder of making simple things into great adventures.  I want them to make the kind of memories that I have of Granny’s and my boys have of Mema’s. 

All it takes to make those kind of memories is a creative mind, a little imagination and a whole lot of love.  Check, check, check.  I think I’ve got this.