Playing In Texas: Part One

Growing up away from my dad’s parents, it was a big deal when we traveled to Texas for the annual reunion. All the cousins would be there to visit too, and immediately upon exiting the vehicles we all would tear off to the backyard.

The yard was probably legendary to us, though such a concept was foreign to me at the time, so I cannot recall if we considered it such. But that yard was one of a kind to us, and it had traditions attached.

Coming from the country, my cousins and I had to develop games to fit the enclosed neighborhood yard. Thank the Lord it was not just a big dirt patch, but was carpeted by a thick layer of meshed grass that allowed for barefoot running. Bushes ten feet high and pourous enough to climb through divided the yard into sections and tunnels, and one entire section was hidden by tall, climbable trees with smooth bark meant for gripping. The sunny section of the yard played host to a great wooden jungle gym that was like a monstrous castle to eight, nine, and ten-year-olds. There was also one especially huge three growing beside the gym, with thick limbs for sitting, one of which leaned over the gym’s slide so that we would run down the hot tin and take a flying leap onto the limb. That place was great. And it had rules.

One such set of rules applied to the Witch Game. At nighttime, particularly when the moon was out, we would all dash outside after dinner and “vanish” into the dark. The point of the game was to hide from the witch who lived in the moon, usually played out by a certain girl cousin because she had the shrillest witch laugh – and she was the youngest. It was a game not unlike Hide-&-Goseek, though unlike the normal game, the witch started out the game in hiding. After a given number of seconds the witch’s “victims” would tumble out from the screened-in porch and huddle nervously under the green porch light above the patio. We wouldn’t see the witch – though we all knew that she could see us – and though we were “safe” on the porch, she could come up to the invisible wall and circle us, a prospect very unnerving to those closest to the porch’s edge. And if anyone stumbled, she would drag them off into dark…so we didn’t stay there long; as soon as the first or second witch laugh was heard we bolted onto the grass and began shrieking and running in circles as the fleet-footed little she-devil materialized from the gloom. In a frenzied chase around the yard we would try to evade her wicked clutches and escape to the jungle gym where we were safe for a while, until it came time to escape again and run back to the porch and repeat the vicious cycle.