Stan tagged me with another one of these lame-o blog memes. I normally gleefully break the chain on these things, but this time around I’ll play along with childish naïveté and do…

The Childhood Meme: What 5 Things Do You Miss About Your Childhood?

This meme requires you to do the following things:

Remove the blog at #1 from the following list and bump every one up one place. Add your blog’s name in the #5 spot. Link to each of the other blogs for the desired cross pollination effect.

1. Lindsay
2. News to Hughes
3. Fluxion
4. Our Obligatory Blog
5. There’s Pie in the Lunchroom

Next, inflict this meme on five new people.

1. Beth
2. Don
3. Peggy
4. Gavin
5. Jim

Finally, list the five things you miss most from childhood.

1. Spanish moss. I lived in rural Florida from age 9 – 12 and I remember the spanish moss being everywhere. Thinking of it takes me back to muggy mornings on Terra Ceia Island, riding bikes all over the island and through what we always called the Indian Burial Ground.
2. A cheap plastic whistle. I lived on a 45 acre spread of woods and rolling hills in Wisconsin from ages 5 – 8. My brothers and sister and I would spend all day playing on the Big Rock, exploring the woods, hiking the hills, and generally just being country kids out in the country. We’d leave the house in the morning and be on our own until lunchtime, when my mom would break out that cheap-ass Zamfir-style whistle, stick her head out the back door, and start blowing on it like a madwoman. I miss the sound of that redneck panflute.
3. Snow. I lived in Wisconsin and Colorado when I was growing up, and I loved the snow. I loved the way the air froze your nostrils, the sound the snow made when it crunched under your feet, the muffled quiet of the morning after a big snowfall. Now that I live in Los Angeles the only snow I see is slushy, muddy, icy, non-powdery manmade crap you find on the slopes at a ski resort. It’s not the same. At all.
4. Waking up in the morning and hearing grown-ups talking in the kitchen. There was something that felt so familiar and safe about hearing those muffled voices down the hall as you first woke up.
5. Innocence. In every way.