Editor’s note: As part of Xpress‘ annual Kids Issue series we invited readers to submit past stories from their childhood in WNC. This is one of several entries.
Many childhood memories are of wandering familiar lands and roads of Riceville and downtown sidewalks. My brothers and I were free to explore the three home acres and visit relatives nearby. We had to stay together and behave. Reports of any waywardness would fly home, even before us.
The woods offered adventures on a flight of fancy. We dug a spot in the pine needle carpet seeking gold. A circle of trees became an audience for the psalm just learned in Sunday school or Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem “The Swing.” (“Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing/ever a child can do!”) Our own rope swing led us to reenactments of scenes from a Tarzan movie at the Starlite Drive-In…