Depending on where you live the country, everything and everyone can be far from everything and everyone else. You can be loud and do almost whatever you want. Being a kid this comes in handy. I love to go outside and goof around with my cousins! There are so many ways to have fun times on the farm! I am starting to feel as though I’m getting too old for horseplay, as soon I will be a young adult going to college.

One of the many fun things we kids like to do is play hide-and-seek in our back pasture. We enjoy building tree forts and what we call hobo huts. A couple summers ago, we pulled old, trashed plywood and carpet, wooden spools, and broken furniture to the back of our ten acres where it is wooded and built a hideout. We still hang out in it.

Trees are our best friends! We love to use trees to help us build our forts.

We also climb a lot of trees. Climbing trees is always fun. The trick is to be the first one up the tree. If not, you may get dirt, bark, small twigs, and leaves in your eyes from the person climbing above you. My aunt would rather not see or know how high we can climb.

Our neighbors would rather not see the old chair my cousin, Ryan, strapped to the tree.

It’s been there for two years now.

When climbing a tree, the first thing you should do is make sure the tree is healthy and not rotting. Then check the tree for ants. My aunt says we should also make sure the tree doesn’t have any hornet, bee or wasp nests, however we kids never really do watch out for hornets, bees or wasps. We do, however, ALWAYS look for ants and rotted out limbs.

Hide-and-seek was fun when it was summertime, because the brush would hide us from each other. We just had to make sure that we didn’t run into any ant piles. Ever been attacked by fire ants? They HURT!

I also try to remember to wear pants and a jacket, because when I forget I come back with lots of briar scratches. I use my pants as “armor.”

One day while playing hide-and-seek, my fourteen-year-old cousin, Austin, and I decided to hide together in the car. Like a genius, he locked the doors with the lock button in the front seat. Then I remembered that if we tried to unlock by pulling the lock up the alarm would go off. So, after hiding for 10 minutes in the stuffy car we  made the decision to quickly open the door and run! So, Austin and I looked at each other and began the countdown…1…2…

“Austin… run for the side gate! No one will see us and we can say we were in the pasture the entire time!” I whispered with panic.

So on THREE we opened the door causing the car alarm to trigger. So we jumped out, slammed the door, and hauled our butts to the gate.

We weren’t scared at all, in fact, we were laughing so hard I was crying. To make matters worse Austin tripped and did a face plant right into the weeds which only made me laugh even harder. We were laughing so hard our bellies ached which only made us laugh even more. I have never had such a better time with my cousin. Just thinking about Austin crashing and burning is making me laugh again!

In the end, the cops didn’t get called and none of our neighbors noticed…which is one of the many benefits of living in the country. To this day, this funny moment playing hide-and-seek with my cousin is my best memory with him. My favorite memories so far in life have been while living with my aunt on her farm in Texas. When I move back to the city for college it’s definitely going to be a change.