I finally got brave enough to stop the car next to a vacant lot nearby, hand Jerry the camera and ask him to take a picture of me holding a great big dirt clod! I was going to shed my senior citizen persona and become a child again. The grass has to be just the right length, which happens shortly after there has been lots of rain. All it takes is one good pull and up comes a dirt clod just like the ones we used to use when we were kids.
What did we use the dirt clods for? For a dirt clod fight, of course.
Oh, how mother used to hate it when my sister and I and the neighbor kids had a dirt clod fight. Right next door to our house was a huge vacant lot, and after a few winter rains had come and the grass and weeds had grown 8 or 10 inches high, we would stage the most wonderful dirt clod fights. We all knew the rules: we couldn't throw them hard, we couldn't aim at faces, and we couldn't hurt each other deliberately. Other than that, it was every man for himself! The big clump of moist earth held together loosely by the new roots was just the right size for making a good splat on someone. It was hard to aim for the head, because none of us wanted dirt in our face, but we did always hope we could land one on someone's head.
The dirt clod fight never lasted too long, because some adult was always coming out of a house somewhere to put a stop to the fun. For the boys, they just went somewhere else and continued to get dirty; for the girls, it meant we had to shed our shoes on the back porch until the dirt on them dried, peel out of our clothes by the washing machine in our laundry room, and head to the bathroom to take a bath and get our hair washed. Mother always told us we shouldn't have dirt clod fights. But many years later she admitted to us that she really knew how much fun we were having because she and her siblings had thrown dirt clods too, so she never could work up too much irritation at our "shenanigans," she called them.
When Jer and I were talking about vacant lots and comparing rules for his dirt clod fights against ours, he also mentioned that he and his friends ate a lot of things from the various plants in the vacant lots. I was really surprised to know that, because I thought my sister and I were the only ones who found tiny edibles in the plants. So when we picked a spot to stop today, after pulling up the dirt clod I wanted to get a picture of the plant that gave us such cute little seeds to eat.
There were lots of these plants around where I was standing, but they weren't big enough yet to go to seed, so I wasn't able to get a picture of the seeds. But he and I both knew exactly what the seeds looked like and what you had to do to get them out of their little seed cases.
The other thing we found plenty of were foxtails, ubiquitous foxtails. Jerry said he and his friends used to take them and put them up the sleeves of their sweaters. The foxtails would quickly work their way up the arms, which for some reason known only to kids brought them great glee! I never heard of doing that. What we would do would be to put our lower arms together, have someone set a foxtail in the crevice at our wrists, and then by rubbing our arms back and forth with a tiny motion the foxtail would scurry all by itself up to our elbows. Now why that was such a fun thing to do is lost to my memory. It seems pretty stupid now, but as kids we thought it was wonderful.
It was fun spending a little time in the vacant lot today. It brought back lots of childhood memories. We are in a pretty rural area and the neighbors weren't all standing out in their yards or peering out their kitchen windows at us, wondering what those two old people were doing. We did get a few woofs from some guard dogs across the street, but I told them "Hello, Pups" and mentioned that we were harmless, so they pretty much left us alone. When we finished our business, we drove off in the car to our senior apartment complex, where we donned our senior citizen look again and went inside our apartment to take a nap.
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