Time Trippin'
I think I was 6 when I moved with my family from Badger, IA, to land eventually in Decatur, IL, where the swings on the playground were a huge disappointment. The swings on the playground in Badger, behind the old two-room schoolhouse that my grandmother had attended, were huge. You could kick your feet in those swings and nearly touch the sky.
It wasn’t until I revisited Badger as a young woman and went to check out that enormous swingset from my childhood that I discovered that it wasn’t that other swingsets had shrunk. It was that I had grown. In many ways, I wish I had never found that out. Our childhoods are meant to contain well loved myths.
The disappointing swingsets in Decatur were on the playground of Brush College Elementary School #1, a school that, by the time it closed its doors in 2013, had sat on that site for 161 years. I can’t prove it but I wouldn’t be surprised if it began life as a two-room schoolhouse as well. Here it is in the 1890's.
The school I attended in 1953 had been added onto, with a couple of extra schoolrooms built nearby. I can’t remember much of my actual schooling, although report cards from that time indicate that I was getting all A’s and B’s. Tellingly, I am consistently marked down for completing work on time. 
It was the 50’s, and all the girls wore skirts or dresses. This is my 4th grade class complete with my favorite teacher, Miss Wright. I am top left. 
I hated it. My favorite picture from that time is one of me in grimy overalls and stringy hair frowning into the camera with my sidekick, Taffy, at my feet. I carried it around so often that I finally lost it. But those of you who know me will have no trouble picturing it. Taffy was a blonde cocker spaniel who virtually lived with me for most of the first 13 years of my life. Many’s the day we snuck off together to shimmy under a barbed wire fence to play in a neighbor’s woodlot. Those are some of the happiest hours I spent as a child. I have dreams of returning there, to this day.
One thing I do remember vividly is playing jacks. I was a jacks champion. Ever play jacks? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bwq9SixttsM I remember spending hours of recess time playing jacks outside in a covered play area. Either that or trying once again to reach the sky on the shrunken swings.
Or trying to beat up the boys. It was this tendency which gave me a memento I carry to this day, even if it’s hard to find anymore. Somehow, I don’t know how, I often ended up in little skirmishes with a bunch of boys who liked to tease me for something or other I disremember what. I was always beaten in these skirmishes. No, beaten isn’t the right word. I was never hurt, exactly. Just pushed around. Today we’d call it bullying. In those days, it was childhood.
And then one day, probably playing with my brothers of which I had a few by now, I discovered the magic of swinging someone around and letting go. It wasn’t exactly fighting, but it was effective. So the next time I found myself in one of these conflicts, as one of the boys thrust his arm out to push me around, I just caught hold of it and started turning in a circle. He couldn’t reach me with his other arm and he couldn’t stop himself from swinging away from me until I let go of his arm. Then he stumbled back a bit before falling down as his pals laughed. I huffed away in triumph. I’d found my move. They didn’t bother me after that.
Except.
Except that afternoon, while I waited with a crowd of my classmates at the top of a set of concrete steps that led down to where the bus waited to pick us up, I felt a push at my back before I sprawled down those concrete steps, and skinned my right knee. I say skinned, because what I saw was a bloody spot about the size of a quarter on my knee that hurt like the dickens (as we kids might have said then). Somebody might have helped me up but nobody told the teachers, I couldn’t see the kid who pushed me, and we all just got on the bus and went home.
I don’t remember how it got infected. I surely told my parents about it – and no, they did not complain to the school. The message I likely got was the same message I got every time I got in trouble, that I probably deserved it and to stop crying about it. I might have been crying, but again, I disremember. My mother, however, would have dressed the wound with iodine (a perennial in the 1950’s medicine cabinet) and bandaids, which I no doubt tore off when playing in the woods.
At any rate, it did get infected and I was taken to the doctor and he (always a he) fixed it right up. I would however, he told my mother, have a scar. Oh dear, my mother said one time to me, I hope you won’t feel too embarrassed to wear a bathing suit.
Well, I did feel a bit embarrassed to wear a bathing suit, but not because of the scars on my knees (there were a few, this being the biggest). I was skinny as a rail pretty much all through high school – not quite the bathing beauty sort.
But my knees? I was always proud of them. I thought other people’s knees looked a little plain. I had adventures written on mine, and in one of them I had gotten the best of the little brat who was teasing me. I’m 83 years old, and I still remember that moment of glory.