The stories of the BB guns and bows & arrows reminded me of a few things.
I remember one really hot evening in July when I was like 8 or 9, and my parents, sister and I were having dinner out at the picnic table in our fenced in back yard. It was around 5:30, hot and humid with sweat pouring off of us. Then my friend & neighbour appears at the fence and scales it like it's nothing and hops down next to us. He is wearing jeans, work boots, a ski mask, goggles, a long sleeve shirt and a old dirty red plaid jacket (which is how we knew it was him). He asked if we I had seen my brother around. We answered 'No' and he took off out our gate carrying his BB gun. A few minutes later my brother hops the fence asking if we have seen our neighbour. He's dressed in a winter jacket, two pairs of sweatpants, converse high tops, a baseball cap with a hand towel tucked in around it and he's wearing my dad's safety glasses and carrying his BB gun. He runs off. A few minutes later we hear the two of them shooting at each other across the street.
Also, my friends and I used to launch rockets, but then we found out how much more fun it was to launch the engines w/out them inside a rocket. We also shot arrows straight up into the air (target arrows of course). Before my dad finished clearing the lot, a couple of my friends and I would shoot arrows back and forth with us each standing on a bank at the ends of the lot. We'd use a walkie-talkie to tell when we were sending the arrow back over so we could lookout for it.
We also built forts, played football, kickball and a bunch of other made up stuff. We even played a game akin to pickleball with an old badminton net we strung across the driveway using the basketball poll and a small step ladder. We used prokadima balls and paddles.
When I was like 5 or 6, my brother would take me riding down the hill at the top of our street in a Radio Flyer red wagon. That was a lot of fun except for the time a car came around the corner at the bottom and we turned, hopped the curb and fell about 5 feet into a little creek. After that, we aimed for the creek every time down.
