Farmyard Fun

I loved growing up on a small farm in northeastern Colorado in the 1950s and '60s. I had nine siblings, and our parents didn't buy us many toys. That only enhanced our imaginations to come up with unique, fun games to play.

We had a large graveled farmyard. One of the games we invented was our version of logrolling. There was a small hill at the east side of our yard. We rolled an empty 55-gallon drum to the top of the hill. The first barrel walker was assisted up onto it, and then someone gave the drum a push.

As the rusty drum rolled down the hill and over the gravel, it naturally gained speed. So did the feet that were trying to stay aboard the metal container. It took plenty of balance and practice to master this pastime of ours.

Falling off was inevitable. In the process, we received a few bruises, skinned knees and elbows. Like typical kids, we'd roll the barrel back up the hill and try again. Our goal was to increase the distance we could barrel-walk.

Another fun game we came up with was simply called fishing. Every spring, Mom bought us an assortment of colored straw hats to wear while we thinned out the extra beets and hoed weeds in our sugar beet fields. I always chose a red hat because red was my favorite color.

The straw hats had strings that wrapped around the front half of the brim and tied under the chin. Those strings came in handy when it was windy. They also served a useful purpose for our fishing game.

When we had worked our way to the end of the field, we took off our hats and laid them on the ground upside down. The different colors of hats were worth a variety of points. We took turns closing our eyes and using the end of our hoe to hook a string and lift up a hat. If you were successful, you had "caught a fish." The one who got the most points won.

When we weren't working out in the field, we spent quite a bit of our time in our barn. We didn't mind its smell, but we were scared of the barn spiders that had taken up residence there. They made their homes on the undersides of the wooden beams that supported the hayloft. They looked huge to us. They had big, round bodies that were a unique salmon color with gray spots. Their bodies also had a few strands of hair.

These ugly spiders inspired my siblings and me to invent a game called Spider. Someone was picked to be the Spider. She or he would chase the other players around the barn, trying to pinch them. If you were pinched, you then became the Spider.

Two ladders led up to the hayloft. Players scrambled up and down the ladders or hung on the rungs, waiting to see what their next move should be. We could also flee to the granary to escape the Spider's pursuit. We giggled as we acrobatically maneuvered from the floor to the hayloft and vice versa. Meanwhile, you had to pay close attention to know who the current Spider was. We made all kinds of commotion in the barn while we played the game. The real spiders simply hung around under those rafters.

On our farm, there was also a shack. My dad had grown up on that farm with 12 siblings. Since there wasn't enough room for all of them to sleep in their small house, the four older boys slept in the shack. The building was furnished with some of Grandpa and Grandma's old furniture.

The shack also had some old school desks in it. Dad bought them when our country school closed. The desks helped make it a perfect place for my siblings and me to play school.

We shut the shack's two bedroom doors. Our classroom was in the combination living room/kitchen. It felt like a one-room schoolhouse. I loved being the teacher and giving my siblings assignments. It was fun to grade their papers. If someone had to go the restroom, they had to raise their hand and ask permission. We used the old outhouse just west of our shack. School was dismissed when we got tired of playing it. Then we'd find something else to keep us entertained.

Our family also came up with a unique way to play softball. When cousins visited at our farm, we had enough players to make up two teams. Our pasture was a great place to play. We used old boards for bases. If the cattle were grazing in the vicinity where we wanted to play, they soon moved on and grazed elsewhere. They probably didn't like all the commotion we made.

We had to avoid obstacles including cactuses and piles of manure. We also had to avoid overthrowing home plate. If the ball went sailing over the barbed-wire fence, the catcher had to crawl under the fence or straddle it to retrieve the ball.

Since my siblings and I didn't get many store-bought toys, we created unique, fun games to entertain ourselves. You can't put a price tag on that!