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Memories by Bev Jackson Cotter

We pretended we were moms playing house on the front steps, baby dolls in buggies, aprons borrowed from Mom, making vegetable soup from water and gravel from the driveway. Once when I remembered there was an open bag of cement in the garage, a cup of that was also added to the soup for texture. When Dad got home from work, he added more cement to our soup and used it to patch a hole in the front steps. What a fun day for a couple of 5-year-old girls.

We even had our own little neighborhood grocery store in my basement playroom. Using an old table for a counter and a shelving unit Dad had no use for, we stocked it with cereal boxes and vegetable and fruit cans and ketchup bottles and coffee cans that Mom washed for us. We drew our paper money and colored it and used colored marbles for coins. Everything we needed to serve our pretend customers.

On Sunday afternoons, when we visited farm relatives, we played in the haymow, climbing steps on the barn wall and jumping into the mounds of freshly harvested hay or straw. What a disappointment when they started stacking bales in the haymow.

When we were old enough to go to the Rivoli Theater on Saturdays to see the popular western movies, we decided to pretend the big branches in our apple tree were horses. Straddling those branches and using our jump ropes for reins, my friend rode with Roy Rogers and I rode with Gene Autry (a real cowboy — smile) through mountain trails and into the sunset. “Happy trails to you … until we meet again.”

And we played school. We were teachers, of course. And we taught our favorite subjects to pretend students, handing out tests and correcting papers, using our imaginations. Pretending we were grown up.

When we were a little older, we played softball on an empty lot in the neighborhood. One of the boys had a ball and bat, and even though we didn’t have enough players for teams, we took turns batting and playing our favorite positions until the older boys got bored with us younger kids.

Then came the junior high years and walking to the Carnegie Library and sitting under a tree in the back yard reading stories about another time and place, another world, or walking across town to the North Side Drug Store, purchasing a 15-cent sundae and carrying it over to Katherine Island to enjoy, or even riding our bikes out to the Rooster Hill and Juglands Dam area for a picnic lunch, or ice skating at Academy Park, or walking to the city beach to play in the water and then lie on our towels in a corner of the tennis court hoping to suntan, not sunburn.

The high school days were more exciting — slumber parties and basketball games and potluck suppers and football games and pooling our dimes and nickels to purchase 25.9 cents a gallon gas so we could drag Broadway on Saturday night.

We were kids. We were safe. We were naïve and innocent. We used our imaginations. We had a grand time. We didn’t know we were creating memories.

Bev Jackson Cotter is a lifelong resident of Albert Lea.