Our neighbors had pet peacocks in Orangeburg. As a child, I thought everyone had neighbors who had pet peacocks. Having the fortune of passing by Duke’s Zoo on the way to school every morning, I would gaze at the llamas, peacocks and other animals who inhabited the East End’s exotic attraction. Then arrive home to see more!

Our next-door peacocks were sociable. And loud. Their screeches could be heard across the neighborhood. More so when they decided to roost on your roof for a session of caterwauling.

Of course, I was a kid. As a child growing up, did any of you take the time to contemplate the hypnotic beauty of a peacock’s plumage? What I never understood was who in their right minds would have a pair of those magnificent creatures as pets. Better yet, who would live next door and consider those beautiful birds a nuisance?

Keeping on the kid track, I would love to travel back to my youth, if only for a few minutes, and re-experience memorable moments. The nightly neighborhood summer hide and seek, for one.

Our yard was large, with plenty of hiding spaces. The night life provided a croaking, chirping, squeaking, squawking symphonic soundtrack to our competition, with the evening’s moisture mixing with the country foliage to create a heady aroma of life in Nature’s domain. The moon and lightning bugs reflected off the foliage, providing shimmering light trails through the woods.

As the runt of the neighborhood litter, I tried to use guile to counter everyone else’s speed, strength, and agility. Meaning, of course, I either stood beside “It” until they finished their count then slapped Home Base in triumph or ran into the house until “It” had left Home Base and slipped out the door to claim Base Safety.

Before you judge me on my sketchy Hide-N-Seek ethics, consider this. These are the same neighborhood kids who once created a back yard haunted house and tried to get me to drink urine as a rite of passage through the haunt (a hat tip to my sister Robin, who put an end to it before the first gulp).

As a child, if you could choose a favorite crunch, would it be your foot on a fresh snow pack on a Winter’s morning, or stepping on the crisp, colorful leaves blanketing the ground on an Autumn day? Springtime, with its fresh foliage, does not offer the auditory pleasures of its sister seasons. And Summer’s sounds are always the shrieks, screams and laughter from children enjoying a respite for Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, as well as the smell of coconut tanning butter.

Have you ever played the Telephone game? Players form a line. The first player comes up with a message and whispers it into the ear of the second person in the line. The second player repeats the message to the third player, and so on. By the time the message is relayed to the last person in the chain, the information bears no semblance to the original missive.

Kind of like nature. I spent every waking moment as a youth in the great outdoors. Today, I hate it. Nature tries to kill us daily. And yet, as a toddler, I believed Mother Earth was my friend.

Whew! When I was child…

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Robert Roe