I've been in Birmingham with my family for a week. Before I leave tomorrow I want to visit the "Indian graveyard" that's deep in the woods in the middle of the block. My childhood friend Katie and I found the abandoned graves while hunting for a better "hideout" -- one safe from her brother and the other sometimes attractive but always irritating boys on our block. When we were nice we played "Ghosts in the Graveyard" and "Kill the Man with the Ball" with those boys. When we were not nice, we set up booby traps for them with yard tools and sinkholes.
When Katie and I found the graveyard, we figured it was a secret or haunted or both, an eighties horror movie starring us. We made rubbings of the graves and took treasures (vintage soda bottles) from the decades-old junkheap nearby. We couldn't resist telling the boys, and Alan Picknose had the gall to lay down in a sunken grave so he could pop up and scare everyone.
My sister Laura calls it an "Indian graveyard" because that's how she remembers it. In my memory, the graves belonged to Victorians, or cowboys, somebody from the late 19th century . . .
Probably the graves aren't as old as all that, but I plan to find out tomorrow.
1 comment:
We used to play "Kill the Man with the Ball," except I was always the man with the ball and it was simply called "Punishment." Ah, life back on Long Island.
Post a Comment