I grew up next door to my cousins, and with four of them and five of us, we always had a ready-made gang of playmates. There was a standing Wiffle ball game every night after dinner, with the corner of our house as first base, our Japanese maple as second base and the large oak as third base.

The Japanese maple never really enjoyed being second base and was eventually replaced by a hydrangea that did quite well after the daily ball games were a thing of the past.

Summer nights were something special. Once it finally got dark, we could play shadow tag in glow of the streetlight. The shadow cast by the light pole was safe, but woe to you if you ventured outside it and had your shadow stepped on.

And then there were the fireflies that we would catch and put inside a glass jar after punching some holes in the lid so that they could breathe. There seemed to be so many of them back then, and even a novice could collect a few. Finally, when we got tired of catching fireflies, we had some epic hide-and-seek games.

The large flagstone in front of our porch was always home base, where whoever was It had to count to one hundred. According to our rules, we had to hide outside, since neither set of parents had any desire to have kids racing through the house. I can remember hiding around the side of the house, heart pounding, hoping that the seeker would go right instead of left so that I would be able to race to home and declare myself safe. This game kept us busy for hours until our folks decided that it was finally time to call us inside.

My Uncle Perk built a pretty remarkable treehouse up in the woods behind their house, complete with bunk beds, windows, a front door reached by a ladder, and a trap door. This was the scene of countless hours of play, and my cousins often slept out there in the summer. I tried to join them out there one night, but my famously horrible homesickness kicked in, and I ran down the hill and home.

Seems like growing up we were always outside playing with my cousins. We were lucky because we only had a few hours of Saturday morning cartoons, not 24-hour access to endless hours of drek aimed at kids. We had to make our own fun and we did, for hours at a time, in the great outdoors.