Dress Ups on the Chicken-Coop Stage

We tried to play a trick on Mrs. Rohrer. We sprinkled plenty of ground black pepper on a bouquet of flowers and presented it to her. She said, “Well, thanks, kids. Isn’t this pretty? But, I never smelled pepper zinnias before.” Of course, she was supposed to sneeze outrageously like in the Nancy comic strip where a seven-year-old could get plenty of ideas. (Favorite Nancy comic strip: Nancy is eating a grapefruit. It squirts her in the eye. She gets up and leaves. Comes back with a laundry sprinkler and shakes it onto the grapefruit and says, “Take that!”) We would play King of the Hill whenever a construction or landscaping project produced even a small mound of dirt. There was something great about climbing to the top and pushing your competitors down. This game inevitably ended up in a real fight when someone got pushed down the hill too hard and got insulted. Chugs (our name for go-carts) were crude wooden platforms with four wheels—you were lucky if any two matched—featuring a movable two-by-four front axle with rope steering and power supplied by your brother pushing on your shoulders. We drew plans for a racer for the Soap Box Derby, but never built it because the wheels were too expensive, but we did go to the races on 7th Street Hill every year to watch the kids mostly crash into each other or fly off the road at the big curve just down from The Plantation restaurant. We played cowboys and Indians with toy guns in Ferry’s Woods. There were enormous oak trees we could climb and stage our attacks from. Sometimes the Indians would go naked. It was mostly just a game of running and hiding and attacking and making up rules as we went along. Mabel Rosener put an end to this when she found out we were going native because she said she couldn’t afford to have her kids losing their clothes. I lost my new shoes for two days once. Daddy went to the woods and found them. Got a licking for that. These games could get out of hand when we started throwing hedge balls at each other instead of acorns. One kid hit me in the nuts with a giant green hedge ball, and they really ached for a long time. Playing with sisters was an occasional affair and usually took the form of playing House or School or putting on impromptu performances presented in the old chicken coop, which, having had its front wall removed, resembled a stage. This became known as The Play House. It was great for Dress Ups in musty-smelling old clothes contributed by neighbors and kept in a trunk there, and for making up silly acts—can’t remember even one—for our audiences of brothers and sisters and neighbor kids, who sat in the grass out front along the garden’s border.