Screen Doors, Doggie Doors, Tree Frogs and Roller Skates

We went shopping for screen doors the other day. I want one for the front door and another for the back that has a doggy door built into it. Unfortunately the back door will not be an old fashioned screen door, but a storm door. As my husband says, he'd rather not come home to find I've been air-conditioning the entire neighborhood all day. So, the screen doors will be used in the spring and fall, but the storm door on the back will be during the heat of summer, and cold of winter so the dogs can go outside to take care of their bathroom business and stop using the mudroom for a potty.
My mother would be rolling over in her grave if she knew I was purchasing potty pads to lay about the mudroom floor for the dogs. But hey, the room is already scented from the two former owners' dogs use of that room as a toilet. Removing those marble tiles will be a job for sometime in the future and hopefully removing them will remove the latent smell of doggie markings. But til then we will make do.

Right now, since it's a nice evening I have the back door open a bit just to listen to the tree frogs.
There must be hundreds of them singing their tiny little hearts out. I think it's the sounds of summer that bring so many childhood memories to the front of my mind.

Did you use clothespins to attach baseball cards to the spokes of your bicycle wheels to hear a clicking noise as you rode your bike around the neighborhood? We did. My brother didn't mind at all sharing his baseball cards with us since, back then, little boys primarily bought them for the bubble gum that came in the wax pack with the cards.

I remember playing jacks with the girls on our street. I wasn't the best with the eye hand coordination, but I did enjoy playing anyway. And an even more trying game was Pick-Up Sticks. Did you play with them? If I recall correctly one player would hold the sticks loosely in her hand in a vertical position, with the bottoms of the sticks resting gently on the floor and then release her hand so the sticks fell in a kind of pattern. The object of the game was to remove the sticks, one at a time without moving another stick in doing so. It was fun and didn't require bouncing a ball and throwing jacks at the same time so I was a bit better at it than other games.

Another game that required a bit more grace than I was blessed with was jumping rope. But, on the playground at school when there was a long rope and two girls throwing it I could, at times, manage to go a few jumps before loosing my turn.
I WAS reasonably good at kick ball because the ball was a large one, and much easier to kick than hitting a baseball with a bat, which I could never do. And, I eventually got pretty good at roller skating on the sidewalk. I saved my own money for a while to buy my own skates. They were $5.00 and I got many good years use out of them. I guess it was games using feet, that were my forte'.

But, as long as people didn't mind my lack of skill, I was always included in one way or another in the neighborhood games. Kids were better behaved back when I was a kid, all the mamas were watching and would let your mama know if you'd not behaved well when with the other chidren.

The only person who had less skill or grace than I, was my sister. Since she was more popular than I was her clumsiness was my saving grace for being included with the girls who lived on our street. Eventually, though, we parted ways and had our own groups of friends from school. And to this day, since she and I have nothing in common, we have not one friend in common, and that suits me just fine.