The good ol' days & mushrooms!

We were little kids, Larry and I, maybe six and eight. It was combining time and our dads helped each other do their fields of oats. This was also in the days when it was safe for us kids to be pretty much on our own all day long. We knew better than to wander off and get lost, not to play in the road, not to go to the water. So long as we showed up for lunch and supper neither Happy nor my mom worried where we were, knowing together we'd be safe.

We'd been playing at all sorts of things all morning and had run out of things to get into. We decided to play Indians in the forest behind the house.

The forest there in those days was pretty brush-free, huge pine trees and stumps all over the place. As it had gotten pretty hot through the morning, this would be the ideal shadey place for us to play. We cleared the pine needles out away from this one good sized flat stump that seemed just the right height for a table to play on. Once we were down to the bare dirt around the stump, we sat there trying to decide what to do next.

There were some huge shelf fungi all over the forest, they might be interesting to check out. So we broke a bunch of them off and brought them back to our table. Then we saw a patch of huge white mushrooms that would be neat, too, and brought them back to our table, too.

I don't remember which one of us got the bright idea we should pretend to cook our "food" we'd just gathered on the table, but we went in the house and got some candles and matches. Don't worry, we knew better than to actually eat any of the mushrooms and fungi.

We melted wax onto the table and stood the candles in the dripped wax. They we held the mushroom pieces over the fire with sticks. Of course mushrooms are too wet to actually cook, but we were good at pretending.

When we got tired of this game, we put our candles and matches under some sticks for later use. When we got in the house, Happy just asked what we'd been doing while she put our sandwiches on the table. We told her all the adventures we'd had and that last we'd played Indians out in the woods. Since she didn't ask for details, we didn't tell her.

I still don't know whatever happened to those candles and matches. I know we played out there again the next day, since all the oats weren't harvested yet. Maybe Larry knows the answer to the mystery of the missing candles and matches.