Biking, sprinklers, sandboxes, playing with my best friend Marnie or my cousin Julie. So many memories of time spent at Julie’s family cottage at Lake Winnipeg (one of the two enormous lakes you notice on any Manitoba map), often for lengthy periods away from my parents. I learned to swim there. I also learned about ticks and leeches….

Chinese skipping (yes it actually began in China)! Fast-stepping manoeuvres across an elastic band stretched around two friends’ ankles. Marnie and I were a twosome most of the time so we needed a tree stump or chair as an extra pair of ankles. The elastic would slowly fray and ultimately snap, necessitating a cry for help to either mom for a replacement!

Hula Hoops. Yo-yo’s. 7-Up – bouncing a rubber ball against any smooth surface, be it the school wall, the side of the house, or even a wall inside the house. 7: off the wall and catch, 6: off the wall, bounce and catch, 5: drop and catch, 4… you get the picture.

I got my first bike when I was 6 – a big bike, perhaps even an adult-sized bike! No work-your-way-up-sizing for me! I remember getting the hang of it, then riding all the way to the end of my street to busy Portage Avenue! By myself! Later on I biked to piano lessons a few blocks away; I loved those lessons, my teacher sitting beside me in his wheelchair. While I remember a bit of the lessons themselves, my most persistent memory is one of biking there: turning left across traffic a bit too quick, feeling my heart pound as a car screeched to a stop – I believe Mom will learn of this event for the first time… right… here.

She tells me we had one of the first swing sets on the street – so popular that she had to regularly send neighbourhood children home so that we could have our yard to ourselves. As for the park, the swings, slides, teeter-totters, and carousels (which we called merry-go-rounds) would never come close to passing the safety codes of today. But… somehow we all survived.

Were those summers as hot as I remember? I don’t actually remember the temperatures from my childhood… just from my later visits home… keeping my parents apprised of how uncomfortable it was trying to sleep in the humidity!! I have no doubt that my misery stemmed from having adapted to the incredibly dry conditions of Calgary. Winnipeg has nice summers, as do most places across southern Canada.