Sunday Scribblings "Adventure"

G'Day,
The prompt this week from Sunday Scribblings is "Adventure".
Well, your whole life is an adventure.
From start to finish.
The different stages we pass through on our journeys
all provide different adventures.
Learning along the way is its own adventure.

Yesterday afternoon I saw something horrible, very upsetting. I have been waiting to hear the news to confirm what I saw but nothing has been on as yet.
Over our house, almost every day, we see sky divers jumping out of planes. A bit before 5 yesterday afternoon I was out in the back yard when I heard a plane flying over and stopped to watch. Three parachutes came out of the plane. Two of them opened the third did not. I watched in horror as it fell picking up speed along the way. I think it would have landed near the oval on the other side of this suburb. I listened for ages but there were no sirens afterward so maybe it was not I person I saw falling. I could not actually see an outline of a person ( but then you don't from here) just the parachute falling with something underneath it. I so hope it was not a person I saw fall.
A few days earlier I was watching three others sky dive overhead and I actually heard a woman's voice screaming Whooo Hooo and I thought that was great. Not something I would ever attempt, but great fun I guess, if you are an adventurer of that kind. Peter's sister has done this many times. She reckons it is great.
Adventure comes to me in different , more gentle forms. I would never be brave enough to pursue such physical types of adventure.
When I was a child my cousin Joe and I were good mates and were always up to something together. We were called the terrible twins as he is just three weeks older than me. It is actually his birthday tomorrow. We will be 50. OMG. When we got together we had adventures. We did things that were probably thought of by our adult carers as dangerous, but we were just kids pushing and playing with the boundaries. We had heaps of fun together. Swimming in the canals around Griffith N.S.W. Joe trying to prove that you can't ride a horse past a camel at the show grounds without getting thrown off, eating fruit off the trees in the orchards until someone chased us, getting stuck in the middle of bindi patches without our shoes. When we were in our teens we used to go swimming in lake Albert every afternoon when Joe was staying at our place. He had his license then and we would burn around in Mum's old car. It didn't go very fast but we used to see how fast we could get out to Oura beach and try to knock a few minutes off the time each trip. They we would spin around on the river flats and have a great time. We always washed the car each afternoon so Mum would not know we had been playing in the mud/dirt. Mum thought that it was lovely that Joe was looking after her car so well. Hehehehe. God it is a wonder we are still here!
Yabbies are little crayfish that live in dams. Australian natives, fun for kids to catch and very tasty too, I reckon they taste better than prawns, but ouch if they nip you. One day (We were 9yrs old) we decided we would go Yabbying. Joe took some raw meat out of the freezer and put it on the roof of the shed in the sun the day before so it would go nice and smelly because the yabbies like it that way. We made our nets from old wire coat hangers and some chicken wire and took a roll of cotton from the sewing machine.
To catch yabbies you get a few feet of cotton, tie the smelly meat on one end and a stick on the other end. You throw the meat on the string into the dam where it is shallow an poke the stick into the mud at the edge of the dam. Then you watch for the string to get tugged. You slowly, slowly pull the string in until you can see the yabbie holding on to the meat, then you scoop the net underneath and get the yabbie in the net. Or if you are good you can slowly pull in the yabbie until it is at the edge of the water and then flick hard on the string and the yabbie flies through the air and up on the bank where you grab it quick before it gets back into the water and away. Sometimes you have 3 or 4 on the line. Lots of fun. I used to like doing it the second way because it was more exciting. Even more fun if someone was behind you and the flying yabby hit them and made them squeal. Anyway.
Next morning we took off early before the other kids were out of bed because we didn't want them tagging along, and besides Joe was annoyed at his older brother Denny for something, I can't remember what, and didn't want to include him. We left at dawn with our fishing gear in two buckets and walked for miles to a dam Joe knew had some Yabbies in it up near Scenic hill. We got a great haul and our two buckets were full and very heavy to carry back to Joe's house on the other side of town, but we did it, with lots of rest stops along the way. On the way home there was a black and white kitten that had been dumped outside a shop. We stopped at to buy a bottle of drink and asked the lady in the shop and she said the kitten had been there for a few days. Being kids we couldn't just leave it there could we? Joe carried it home with us inside his shirt, getting lots of flea bites on him along the way. He sent me inside first to butter up my Aunty Joan about the kitten. Hehehe. He had that cat for years. Then we boiled up a big pot of water and cooked our Yabbies and didn't give Denny, my older cousin, one of them.
Then there was the time we caught frogs in our gum boots to scare the girls with, I didn't consider myself a silly squealing girl but had fun teasing the ones who were. We also used to pinch petrol because it used to lay inside the hose from the pump in the back yard of my grandparents house. Then we would get some money and go down the shops and buy a box of matches and write things in the dirt and set them alight. We had a fascination for fire. I still do, pottery has earth, water and fire, my favorite things. I didn't think we were being dangerous because to our 9 year old minds we knew what we were doing. I don't think as an adult I would approve of kids wandering around at will like we were able to do in that country town years ago. Now days parents are paranoid about letting their kids loose. Which of course I understand as a parent when you read and hear on the news of the horrors that can happen. My own kids were a little in between these two extremes in their upbringing. They did have the pleasure of some freedom because they lived in a small town but were not left to wander as much as I was able to do just a few years earlier.
I think that kids adventures are important because they are a great learning experience. You can't learn the same from a T.V. screen or a computer game played safely inside your own lounge room, they are get no physical exercise from that.
But as a parent you think of all the what if's in letting your kids out to play without adult supervision.
Bye
Love Linda.