A few weeks ago, during a particularly violent thunderstorm, our neighborhood experienced a power outage that lasted several hours. Of course, I personally don’t mind power outages (except when one continues for a week or more, as was the case after Hurricane Lili ) mainly because they provide a good opportunity for me to curl up on the sofa in the den and, by battery-powered light, read a novel and not be distracted by any of the approximately six zillion movies Chet, my hubby, records and/or purchases in a month’s time. 

Anyway, on the day after the power outage, I was talking with a neighbor who was complaining that her kids had driven her “totally crazy” with their endless whining during the power outage.

“Why were they whining?” you ask. 

Well, the kids were whining because they were bored. After all, their computer and video games, wide-screened televisions, and other assorted technological gadgetry are all dependent upon electrical current.

Yet, as I stood there under the sweltering spring-time Louisiana sun listening to my neighbor go on and on about her kids, I tried to recall a time when my siblings and I had whined to our parents about being bored; and the odd thing was, try as I might, I could not recall a single instance.

But, I wondered, why was this the case? Well, it’s really quite simple, I immediately concluded. We were just too darn busy to be bored.     

As I’ve mentioned before, my family was poor. Not that Bud, Vicki, and I, being children and, therefore, naïve to the ways of the world, ever thought of ourselves as poor, although, as I have also mentioned, once we began school, made friends, and visited those friends’ homes, we did come to realize that perhaps our family wasn’t as “affluent” as some other families in the immediate vicinity. Still, being poor did not stop us from being happy. Nor did it stop us from having fun. In fact, perhaps our poverty contributed to our fun in many ways since, unlike so many kids today, we had to rely upon creativity and imagination for our entertainment.

For example, we once built an entire Indian village in “The Little Woods,” which was what we called the stand of loblolly pines and dogwoods beyond the garden to the left of the house, and which should not confused with “The Woods,” those hundreds of acres of dense forest that stretched out around where we lived and wherein dwelled black bears, bobcats, and, if my Cousin Tommy was telling the truth, assorted gnomes, trolls, and werewolves, as well as some hairy, vile-smelling manlike creature with really big feet. 

Anyway, in building our village, Vicki, Bud, and I first constructed teepees. For this task, we borrowed daddy’s hatchet to chop down then whack the limbs off pine saplings in order to make poles; and these poles we leaned against the trunks of pines then covered with bushy pine boughs, followed by heaps of pine straw (Notice that the pine is a versatile tree). Next, we retrieved large rocks from the banks beside the road (Vickers was a dirt road back then) and hauled the rocks to our village in the Radio Flyer wagon Santa had left under the tree one Christmas. These rocks were used to encircle the campfire so flames wouldn’t escape and burn down The Little Woods when we cooked venison, turkey, rabbit, and other assorted wild game (If Daddy had just been paid, we might have hotdogs and marshmallows filling these roles. If he hadn’t, we had to settle for ears of corn pilfered from the garden). In addition, we fashioned bows and arrows from—you guessed it—pine limbs, and we also had an impressive string of Indian ponies.

Naturally our ponies were homemade since we couldn’t afford the fancy stick-horses (with their velvety heads, brightly colored yarn manes, and rolling plastic eyes) that stood in a container near the rear of Vickers 5 & 10 in downtown Fairburn. Then again, we reasoned our ponies were better since they were rawboned, rugged mustangs, not sissified, pampered thoroughbreds.

To make our ponies, we used old broom handles for the bodies or, if those were in short supply, any stick we could find, including the occasional pine limb; and we created the heads from old socks, upon which we meticulously drew the ponies’ features—eyes, nostrils, and mouths—with colors selected from a box of 64 Crayola Crayons. Head then complete, we fashioned bridles and reins from whatever was available —cord, rope, string, old belts—usually pilfered from “The Shack,” which was what we called the log building behind the house that doubled as Daddy’s workshop and a storage building for row-upon-row of Mason Jars, all filled with the bounty of Mama’s summertime canning and jelly-making.

Finally, when our village was complete and our trusty steeds munching pine straw in their corral of pine limbs, Vicki, Bud, and I would sit by the campfire, roast “wild venison,” tell ghost stories, sing “Down in the Valley” or “On Top of Old Smokey,” and, yes, plan our next big project. Maybe it would be a medieval town, complete with a castle and moat, and we would be knights. Or maybe it would be a distant galaxy and us space explorers. Or maybe, just maybe, it would be something far grander than anything we had yet to imagine. We didn’t know. All we knew was that anything was possible and life was far from boring.