Grandmas are just antique little girls

One of my biggest disappointments when I “grew up” is that I did not get outdoors much. I remember sitting on the back porch of our house in Weaver with three small children at my feet and wishing we weren’t so housebound. After the children got older, I started working at The Star’s old building on West 10th Street, which was windowless. No wonder I spent years longing for blue sky and fresh air.

As a little girl, I spent almost every waking moment playing outdoors when I was not in school. I lived in the Norwood community where there were lots of curved streets for bike riding and where we could use school’s playground in the afternoons and on weekends. In addition to skating on the sidewalks in front of the school, catching tadpoles at the end of Norwood Avenue, and picking all kinds of wild edibles in the woods, we neighborhood kids would often play games or just run or walk. No wonder we were all skinny. Those days went away all too fast and so did those “indoor” years.

Thank goodness I now have grandchildren. I’m rediscovering the outdoors when I’m with them, and I’m remembering how much fun it is to play without thinking about the energy I’m exerting.

Recently I took my 5-year-old grandson and my 7-year-old granddaughter to a neighborhood park in East Anniston. My granddaughter and I swung and sang songs. I realized the grandson was struggling to swing. I showed him how to pull forward on the chain and lean forward, to pull backward on the chain and lean backward. “Pump your feet back and forth as you lean,” I told him. Try as he did, he couldn’t get it all together. I pushed him off a few times. Finally, he was able to swing and sing along with us girls.

By the time we got to Froggie Went a Courtin’, we were all three swinging and laughing hard. I showed the children how to twist around as we sang and get at least one good backward swing in before the chain untwisted itself. By then we were on Skip to My Lou. I was sweating. No wonder. I pushed off the grandson, jumped back in my swing, pulled and pushed my own chains, pumped my feet, sang and laughed. What good exercise we were getting.

In addition to working out, I learned from the 5-year-old a new lyric for Take Me Out to the Ball Game. The 5-year-old’s version was “Buy me some crackers and Apple Jacks, I don’t care if I ever get back.” That was so funny I had to leap out of my swing, followed of course by my two shadows. We leaped over the sand and lay down in some nearby soft leaves to catch our breath. I appreciated living in Alabama at that moment. How many other places could I stare at the sky while lying on a mattress of water oak leaves in early January?

The trouble with relying on play for exercise is that I’m not with the grandchildren all that much. That’s why it is important to have time set aside to exercise like a proper adult should. Who’s to say, though, that we can’t play like kids the other two days, or that we shouldn’t fit play time into our structured exercise?

I like to walk with other adults, which I sometimes do. I like to play tennis, but I lost my racket somewhere along the way. My husband has been saying we need to buy us some bicycles, which I wish he would hurry up and do.

Nothing, though, beats the unstructured exercise I get when I play with those grandchildren. It’s the combination of laughing a lot, moving around quickly and doing the unexpected.

Just this past summer, as the children and I were waiting on my husband, we found ourselves killing time at the edge of some woods in Golden Springs one evening. I whooped loudly to get a response from the grands. They whooped back. Our voices echoed back from a stand of trees against a nearby hill. I whooped again and jumped into the air. The grandchildren whooped and jumped. I whooped louder than ever and ran in a circle. The children fell in line behind the leader. By then we were all laughing and sweating like crazy, even though the night was dark and cool. We enjoyed that 20-minute wait.

One of my friends has a sign in her kitchen that says, “Grandmas are just antique little girls.” I’m going to get me a piece of wood soon and paint me a sign like that for my kitchen. I love feeling like a little girl again and remembering when there was no difference between having fun and exercising.