Running Wild

Running Wild

Six years old.  We lived in a small salt-box house next to the swamp along the Fox River in Burton’s Bridge, Illinois.  The one-room school was a two mile walk and there were no busses.  We kids all walked along the asphalt and gravel road rain or shine.

I  had just started first grade .  There was no kindergarten, and grades one through four were all in this single room.  I have no memory of where older kids went, but I do remember we were about to move to a bigger house in Crystal Lake, where I would finish the last portion of the school year, so I would be leaving this rural school for a more “townish” life.

It was determined that I needed corrective lenses.  I didn’t know what that meant until I was told “glasses.”  I wasn’t as concerned at having to wear this adult thing that my Mother and Grandparents wore as I was about my running.

As a child one of my greatest loves was going outside just anywhere and running.  Through the cow meadows, the gravel swamp road or along the river; I loved to run everywhere.  Not with others, just myself.  Not for time or endurance, just for the fun. And the best part was; at my fastest, I loved the rush of wind against my eyes.

I noted my Mother and her glasses. They covered her eyes.  How was I to feel my beloved running wind on  my eyes if they were shielded ?   It didn’t occur to me then that I could take off the glasses when running. I never saw my Mother or Grandmother not wearing their glasses.  All I was concerned about was that my wonderful pleasure was about to be lost.

The folderol of going to a big city eye doctor in Elgin, where I saw my first escalator; of moving to a new place where the neighbors were right next door; and where school was this modern humungous building with hundreds of kids and a place right inside where you could buy food and milk; all crowded out  my precious running memory.  I forgot about it and was diverted to new things. 

But now, I have time to wistfully recall that wind in my eyes and the sheer pleasure of just running. Were it not that my knees are too weak and my arthritis too strong, I would take off my glasses right now and go for a run!

- 2013 Jerry Wendt 427 words

 This is the result of a writers class exercise to write 400 words on an early childhood memory