Things I Took for Granted While Growing-Up

A VERY abbreviated list:

• Having parents that hadn't divorced.
• Knowing 2 Great-Grandmothers.
• Knowing all of my Grandparents & seeing them more than once-a-year.
• Living within 45 minutes of all of my Aunts, Uncles, and First Cousins (a total of 5 families).
• Knowing a good number of Great-Aunts, Great-Uncles, 2nd Cousins, and a variety of other relatives.
• Having a ready identity anywhere in town (even if they didn't know me, they would know my parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, or cousins).
• Having a self-employed father who was able to spend a lot of time at home (especially in the winter).
• Wheat harvest in June--complete with combine rides, playing in the wheat in the trucks, and riding in the truck to the elevator.
• Moving only once--less than a 1/4 mile & didn't change our address.
• Changing addresses only once--when the 911 addressing was implemented.
• Never changing our phone number.
• Experiencing a phone on a party-line.
• Wide-open spaces.
• Seeing the stars at night.
• Sleeping out to watch for falling stars.
• Having a choice of farm ponds for camping, fishing, and ice-skating.
• City streets and country roads laid out in grids.
• Country roads laid out on the mile.
• Having a Mother who could sew anything, including a Purple Doodad costume and a prom dress.
• Having a Dad and Grandfather who could fix, make, or build anything--including making block toys, building a play set (with a platform, teeter-totter, horizontal ladder & great-grandmother's swing set), making custom treasure boxes designed by children, and fixing electronic toys that had shorted out or broken a connection.
• Always having something new to read.
• Being friends with my siblings.
• Knowing why fields are terraced. (As a plane landed in Kansas, I heard a parent explain to their child that the terraces are to keep the cattle in the field.)
• Knowing the difference between straw and hay.
• Observing a variety of animals in their natural surroundings, including deer, foxes, squirrels (which are brown, btw), rabbits, snakes, mice, prairie dogs, owls, hawks, and a variety of other birds and animals.
• Watching a field transform from hard, dried dirt covered in stubble, chaff, and weeds to clean, lush brown soil as it is plowed.

For the sake of getting this posted, I'll end my list there. Perhaps I'll continue to add to it as I'm in the mood.