Playtime on a Hot Day, 1940s

On a hot day like today, this is how a little boy and girl would have spent their playtime:

Daddy was plowing the rows of cane, throwing the brown dirt against the little plants, covering new grass that had emerged.  Mama, Daddy and Wanda had already hoed the long rows; Charlotte wasn't trusted yet to distinguish the good plants from the grass plants.

Mama was in the tiny kitchen, canning peaches that Wanda had helped peel.  The cookstove made the little house hot, even though the breeze blew through the open windows.

So when her cousin, Dane, came to play, Charlotte was glad to get out of the house.  She picked out a few paper dolls, cut from a catalog (since no one would be ordering a bathing suit, Mama had let her tear out those pages) and they took them down to the branch in front of the house.  The water was cool on their bare feet as they waded into it to let the paper dolls go swimming.  When the dolls were so soggy they were in danger of coming apart, Charlotte spread them out on a rock to dry so they could be used another time. 

Now they turned their attention to the crawdads which tried to hide beneath the rocks.  With each movement of the kids, the crawdads scurried backwards to the safety of the rocks.  It wasn't easy to catch one with their hands, but they had learned to slip up behind one and quickly grab it behind its sharp "pinchers".  Those pinchers were strong and could really hurt little fingers, so they decided to "fish" for the crawdads with a piece of bacon fat tied to a twine string.  They lowered the fishing lines carefully in front of the big crawdads, and in a jiffy the pinchers grabbed the fat, and the kids eased their catch up out of the water and into a glass jar filled with water.  They would take the largest ones to Wanda; she knew how to open them up and find the little "pearl" inside.

Charlotte gathered up the dry paper dolls and they left the cool water until another day.

Charlotte