A place and time...

Do you ever have items you see in a store or on the internet and it just automatically takes you back to a place and time that brings a smile to your face....

Well for me, it was recently a package of jacks.

I was the Queen of Jack's. I could do all the way to my ten'sies without missing any. We had a concrete patio out back that was perfect for playing and in the winter, we could play on the kitchen linoleum. But this one memory always resurfaces and makes me laugh at the antics of four young friends. 

When I was around 2 or 3 the Kuhn family moved three houses up the holler from ours. My sister, Rachel, was a year older than me. The Kuhn's had a daughter my age named Vickie and a daughter a year younger than me named Teresa. Mom and Dad became friends with the parents and a friendship between us for girls was formed. It has stood the test of time and has given us many, many happy memories. 

One such memory was the great jack episode when we were probably around 8 or 9. We were always at each others house and I mean ALWAYS. We would go up there or they would come down to us and we were allowed to play for an hour. Then we usually coerced the mom's to let us go to the other house for another hour. So we were together for two hours almost every evening of our life till we got in high school. 

But one of my funniest memories was when we were at Vickie and Teresa's and Helen was making a big old pot of either soup or beans, I can't remember which. We talked her into letting us play jacks in the kitchen floor. She said as long as we didn't bounce the ball to high and break anything. Now, of the four of us, Vickie was our more, shall we say bold, adventurous one. When I look back on the few times the four of us ever got in any trouble, it was usually Vickie's idea. but we just went along with whatever she suggested. 

Well, it was her turn to throw the jacks. It was a high number like the nines or tens that she had to pick up all at one time. If you have ever played jacks, you know that the more you have to pick up, the higher you need to bounce the ball to have time to swoop up the ones you need. 

Well, Vickie took her turn. She threw out the jacks, eyed the layout to put together a game plan to get them all. She bounced the ball. It went up, but ...... it never came back down. She had forgotten that we had lost the jack ball and were using one of my brother's bouncy balls. And if you have ever bounced a bouncy ball you know they can go high.

As a matter of fact, this one went so high....it landed right in Helen's big soup/bean pot. Well, suffice it to say that we didn't get to play jacks in the kitchen any more, we learned a valuable lesson about bouncy balls, and most importantly we ended up with a funny story to remember the rest of our lives. 

To this day, I can't see jacks or bouncy balls without remembering that day.