Posted by Liberty on May 3, '07 6:21 PM for everyone
How I loved to play with marbles! Competing with boys so I could take home the most number of them without scratches on those beautiful, colorful round glasses. Down on my knees on the ground, unmindful of the dirt my dress was accumulating, scratches piling up on my knees, I tried to spot the best angle to get those marbles right on my holes on the ground!
Just like many of you, I chased dragonflies and captured fireflies in jars.I would make-up stories of dwarfs and fairies for my younger siblings to listen to on rainy nights, as we were mesmerized by fireflies dancing inside the jars. I told them they were fairies who became fireflies because they disobeyed their parents and their big sister! So they better be nice to me!
I flew paper kites made out of the colorful comic section of the newspaper. Mother never gave me extra money to buy those colorful Japanese papers so I had to improvise. I was not allowed to use my store bought glue or paste for school so I discovered that using cooked rice as a paste works quite well too!
And yes, being with the boys all the time, I also learned to mix broken pieces of bottles with some starch, and coat our kite strings with them. My tail strings became killing weapons against other kites that may get entangled with my string. I imagined I was flying war planes, not paper kites, so every kite I killed was a victory for me. Until my mother learned of what I was doing, and I became a prisoner of war. Grounded for two weeks.
Speaking of wars, I did really enjoy playing soldiers in war games. My sister Lalaine did too. So many times we were the lone girls playing war games with boys in our neighborhood. We enjoyed wrestling and outwitting the boys. And typical of boy games, there was a lot of roughness involved. That did not stop me either, until one day, one of the boys who felt he was going to be loose to me again decided to KISS me instead! Yuck! Yuck! Yuck! That boy had my knuckle for lunch that day, but I never played war games with boys again since then.
But one childhood thing I did not stop doing for a long while was dancing in the rain. When it rained heavily, me and my siblings would go out the streets and played and danced in the rain, naked! I must have done this too often that when I went home one time from the States, many of our old neighbors said, "Yes, we remember you. You're that kid who always ran naked in the streets when it rained!" Yayks!Embarrassing.
"How does snow look like in reality? How does it feel when you touch it?", we continued to ask her. She said. "They almost are like powder, like baby powder? And they are cold to the touch like ice". My brother, sister and I stood there transfixed by the magical picture on the card, trying to process what she said. After a long while, I said to my siblings, "Come, I have an idea!"
We went to our bedroom and I opened the supply cabinet in the corner.Just as I hoped there would be, were two big, family-sized plastic bottles of Johnson's Baby Powder. "Baby powder?", my two siblings quipped. "Ssshhhh, yes", I said. "Mom said snow was like baby powder right? I think we can have our own snow right here!" Their eyes got so big when they realized what I was getting into. And we screamed in delight as we took turns emptying the entire contents of the big bottles of baby powder onto the floor!
Pretty soon there was about an inch of "snow" on the whole bedroom floor. And if there's snow, there should be some skiing right? We all took socks out of the drawers, donned them, and started skiing on the floor with our sock clad feet! We skid and skid and skid for I don't know how long. Screaming, bouncing against each other, landing on the floors with our butts as we lost balance sometimes but it was sheer fun.
That was until our nanny finally had enough of all the noises we were making.Then she discovered the ski resort we built!
She was so mad (I think she did not like the idea of cleaning that mess afterward) we stood motionless there for a while like bunnies caught in a trap! She said we would definitely tell our mother about what we did.That our mother should be waiting for us later on at the living room, where she was having some afternoon snacks with a couple of her friends.
The nanny left and me and my siblings started looking at each other. We realized we were covered in powder from head to toe. Our hair looking so white like old people. Then another idea came. Like one last hurrah for the day, we decided to pull some white sheets and pulled them over our heads to make ourselves look like old ghosts. We looked at each other and we died laughing.
We decided that we would scare our mom as we "report" to her in the living room. We were sure she would find it funny. And perhaps forgive us for our crime. So trying so hard to control ourselves from laughing out loud, we all moved towards the direction of the living room where our mother was, crawling low on the floor.
They all seemed so absorbed with whatever gossip they were sharing that day, we were able to get behind our mother without any of them noticing us. We were all curled up behind the chair she was sitting, and then slowly we hoisted up our veiled, white faces towards her and started moaning. My mom turned towards us and one look at our white hairs and white hooded faces she started screaming. Her screaming caused the other two women screaming. And before we knew it pandemonium broke loose. Biscuits flying around, glasses dropping on the floor and crashing into pieces.
I guess our mom did not find our antic funny. She sent us screaming mad back to our room, telling us we were going to clean up the mess ourselves, not the maid nor the nanny! We got so freaked out by the aftermath of the joke we played we were all crying as we returned to our room. Then we found ourselves looking at our tear-streaked faces.Our tears caused our powder-filled faces to crease and crack in all kinds of weird ways we found ourselves laughing at each other again.
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