I grew up in a very, very small town, population 299 it said on the sign.  I don’t know that we ever made 300.  And that’s a very different kind of life than people who grew up in larger places.  We lived in a house on the end of a street where there was countryside. I’m too old to have had a childhood that included television, anything like that you know.  So I wandered around among the trees and along the creek watching for minnows and things like that.  That was the kind of childhood that I enjoyed. Wandering along the creek watching for minnows, building, making mud pies and sprinkling dandelion blossoms ground up on top for frosting and trim, that sort of thing. Poking around, looking and see what was growing, what was doing. I was by myself mostly.  We did not have many children, any children that lived on that street. And then did some fishing a little later on.  My mother somehow trusted that we were not going to fall in the creek. I, maybe she didn’t understand what could’ve happened to us, but she allowed us to go down with a  cane pole and sit and spend time waiting for the little brown cork to bob up and down which meant you  had a nibble.