The Woods Out Back

This is my entry for Blogophilia Week 9





Week 9 Topic: The Woods Out Back

bonus points (hard, 2 points): Include the breaking of Grandma's ugly vase.

bonus points (easy, 1 point): Mention the Moonwalk.

Final day to post: May 5, midnight GMT.


I really planned to get this entry in earlier this week.  Those plans got fouled up when my husband was off all weekend.  So here goes a hurried, little bit fiction, little bit non-fiction story.

When I was a kid, I always loved going to slumber parties at other people's houses.  The best ones were at houses way out in the country, because it was dark and quiet, and we could get by with making lots of noise outside.   One party in particular was memorable for me, because it involved playing truth or dare, having a séance, and boys streaking.

There were about 10 of us girls outside, all age 13 or so.  We'd already stuffed ourselves with hot dogs, chips, cookies, cokes, and decided to play Truth or Dare.  You  know the game:  if you pick truth, you have to tell a true fact about yourself that nobody knows about; if you pick dare, you have to do whatever somebody dares you to do.  You get to learn quite a lot of interesting facts about people, because nobody wants to pick the dare.  That usually involves kissing another girl, or going and doing something ignorant in front of the adults or something.

The Truth or Dare game got us brave enough to try having a séance.  We sat in  a circle and someone began trying to communicate with some dead relative.  Now this kind of thing I never believed in, but young girls can come up with all kinds of noises and such to scare themselves with.  We were sitting quietly, hoping to hear from the dead, when we heard a crash.  A big old ugly vase that belonged to the dear departed Grandma, the very person we were trying to summon, had fallen off of the picnic table right into the middle of our circle!   That had me believing a little more in the ability of the dead to communicate with us.  Nonetheless, the séance was over.

Just as we were wandering off under the trees, we started hearing whistles from the woods out back.  It was too dark to see anything, but we figured it was the boys from school coming to visit, since they knew we would be having a slumber party.  We heard a loud whooping, and there came 5  boys running past the end of the barn, naked as a jaybird.  They streaked right past us and stopped under the streetlight and did the Moonwalk, all in a row.  Then they ran around the other side of the barn and back into the woods.  Well, we were screaming, laughing, shocked and kind of awestruck all at the same time.  The nerve of them!  How could they be so brave to do that in front of us?  (But it WAS fun wasn't it?)

We had quite a lot to tell the others at school that Monday, though all the boys denied participating.  There was no other slumber party as fun as that one - it was the first time I'd ever seen a boy naked!