There is a word we rarely hear at the Billing house — ok, really there are several I’d better never hear. But the kids have been told what will happen if I hear the “B Word”, and for the most part they remember, having experienced the consequences in the past. Because here, the word “bored” is truly a dirty word, since the bored party is immediately assigned something to clean!
I really don’t remember ever being bored. The summers stretched long when we were kids, but that was a good thing! Most days I played with the other kids and cousins in the neighborhood. We rode our bikes, played in the garden hose or walked to the little corner store for ice cream bars — I liked the strawberry shortcake ones best, the ones with the strawberry and white crumble on the outside!
Every other week the Bookmobile came and parked in the same spot, and we could haul home however many books we could carry to last for the next two weeks. When we were a little older my cousin Deb and I would ride our bikes six or eight miles to the edge of Wapakoneta, and then ride back home. It took a couple of hours, but we didn’t have anything else to do when we weren’t sneaking raspberries from my Aunt’s garden.
But at some point I must have been bored, because I remember being told to do things that would only have been said if I’d had nothing to do. “Twiddle your thumbs,” is one I remember from my Grandma Gierhart. I wonder if kids today know what twiddling your thumbs is? I can also remember crocheting chains that went all the way across the living room at Grandmas — the long way from the door to the stairs, not the short way from the kitchen door to the picture window mind you.
I remember carrying a salt shaker around outside at Grandma’s, too. She said that if we sprinkled salt on a bird’s tail, then we could pick it up. Never managed to get close enough to salt one. And while I don’t remember trying to salt a bird after age five or six, I will admit I was probably in junior high before I realized the irony of this activity! (Actually I’m still pretty naïve and fall for things like that today, but that’s another column entirely, maybe two!)
So are my kids bored? Is my house immaculate? Is my laundry caught up? Well, no, not really. The kids keep busy reading, playing in the yard and riding their bikes. They walk to the library for books and activities once or twice per week and some nights we walk to Jim’s for ice cream or Subway for a cookie. The more things change, the more they stay the same. I wonder if my kids know how to catch a bird in the yard? I wonder if I have two extra salt shakers…
