Down the Paths of a Wild Childhood

[akirlu]

poliphilo has posted a things-to-do-before-you-X bucket list that I found charming and different from the usual run of the meme. It's the British National Trust's list of 50 Things To Do Before You're 11 3/4. His post and our subsequent conversation about it has got me thinking about the nature of a Swedish childhood, or at least mine, and how it ties into the idylls of the Moomin books, and my own ideas of what a childhood should be like, and the weirdness of grokking nostalgia when you are six years old, and I hope to get on with writing that all up, soon, but in the mean time, you can go there and tot up your own points against the National Trust's ideal of preadolescence. It's fun.

Comments

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Gosh, I did a lot of those things by age 15, but certainly not before I turned 12.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

See, I did a lot of those things before we left Sweden, so, before I was 7.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

If I didn't have so much to do today, I'd try to think what the natural equivalents were of the ones we didn't have where I grew up. I spent a lot of time here and a lot of time in Nebraska, and conkers: we had them not. Ditto snails. Ditto crabs, unless they mean the bad rowing kind of "catch a crab." And here I bet I could come up with different things, other things, that were just as much fun for kids outdoors to go in the place of those. Nebraska, though...there's only so much separate fun you can have in tall grass and the "separately planted so that we have a forest now" forests and the carefully man-made lakes.

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

(I substituted crayfish for crab and gave myself that point.)

[alexfandra.livejournal.com]

Well, some of those things are too British to transfer to my childhood in eastern Washington and Montana, and there was no such thing as geocaching or that boulder jumping business in the Ancient Days when I was a kid. But I still got 31 of them, and I'd add "ride a horse", "stay at a farm", "explore a cave", "shoot with a bow and arrow" among other fun stuff to my personal list. My sister and I had a very active, fairly unsupervised childhood (I guess we were "free-range" kids), and when we visited our cousins in Montana we were turned loose in all kinds of wild places to make our own fun. We also camped quite a bit. I'm SO grateful for that experience.

Oh, and I ADORE Tove Jansson's Moomin books -- re-read them nearly every year.

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

[I commented there:]
I score about 23, but this list is parochial in both space and time.
Most of the U.S. lives in suburbs, where the places implicit in most of these don't exist. A lot of kids only see a plant (aside from weeds) that no one planted only trough a car window. As for open water other than landscaping, forget it.