Nostalgia by Betsy Ashton

A few days ago I sat talking with a friend about raising kids today. We reminisced over lattes about how wonderful it was go be a kid when we were, well, kids. Imagine this setting.

Six kids ranging in age from three to seven lay in the grass on a hill and stared at puffy white clouds floating in a deep blue sky. Four bicycles and one tricycle lay scattered on the grass, along with a pair of clip-on skates. The girls wore shorts and cotton blouses with buttons, the boys tee-shirts and shorts. Each had ridden a bike or tricycle or skated over two miles from their neighborhood to hang out at a local park. They played a game of guessing what the clouds looked like.

Flash forward to today. Parents drive their kids to the park, bicycles and tricycles in the back of their mini-vans. Kids ride only on the path that weaves through the park, never out of sight of their helicopter parents. No child skates unless in a rink wearing the latest in shoe skates.

Kids no longer lie in the grass. "You might get bitten by a tick and get Lime disease." "You might get dirty." "All sorts of bad things live in the grass." "You might get bitten by a snake."

Don't even think about picking a blade, putting it in just the right place between your thumbs and blowing through the gap to make a whistle. "You don't know what pesticides the park groundskeepers used on the grass."

Kids wear hats and sunscreen to the point where little of the sun's beneficial rays ever strike skin. Heaven forbid a kid today gets a slightly crisped nose. No longer do peeling noses teach lessons about being careful.

Even at parks, the older kids don't look at the sky. They look at images of clouds on their smart phones rather that look up and imagine.

Kids used to be able to slide down metal slides and singe the backs of their thighs. They played on swings, trying to go high enough to feel like they were flying. Old metal merry-go-rounds spun kids until they were dizzy.

I don't know about you, but I grew up as a free-range kid. I skinned knees, got sunburned, fell off my bike and lost clip-on skates when I bumped along rough sidewalks. And I loved lying in the grass watching the clouds float by. They took me away from reality on magic carpet rides of my imagination.

Do you miss being a free-range kid? I do.

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Betsy Ashton is the author of Mad Max, Unintended Consequences, and Uncharted Territory, A Mad Max Mystery, which is now available in e-book at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Returning Home But Leaving Part Of My Heart Behind

by Betsy Ashton

I'd been gone two years without returning home. Without stepping foot on US soil except to vote at the American Embassy and a couple of raids at the BX with an air force officer I met. When it was time, I didn't want to go. I couldn't stay either. I was torn.

I spent two years in Japan in graduate school, working on a masters degree in Japanese literature, immersed in the culture, rarely speaking English. I was twenty-one when I left home, already a college grad. I had no idea what it was going to be like living in another country where I could never assimilate. After all, this was Japan and everyone there was Japanese. Everyone but me, that is.

Friends in my student apartment house taught me to shop, use the train and subway systems, the etiquette of the public bath. My "apartment" was a four-and-a-half tatami room with a squat john for a toilet and cold running water. I had a gas ring for cooking and a small electric furnace for heat. A floor fan to cool the sweat in the summer. No furniture. In a nine- by nine-foot room, you don't have furniture. You have a small table with cushions on the floor. Bedding folds up and goes into a closet every morning.

Did I mention public baths? Yup. Mine was two blocks away. I carried my wash basin, all my lotions and potions and towels down the street to bathe with other women and children from my neighborhood. Dark auburn hair halfway down my back. 5'8" tall. Skinny. Striped tan lines in the summer.  I was the only foreigner and the kids were transfixed.

I learned to hold my wash cloth in from of my privates. Japanese women aren't shy about showing their breasts to other women, but they hide their privates. When the man who ran the bath house walked through the women's room, I covered my breasts the first time. That was poor manners. I never did it again. I gradually go used to the bath house owner moving through, to men's voices on the other side of the wall, to nodding at clean bodies walking away from the bath.

One day, a young child stared and stared. I was terribly sunburned from a week at the beach. She wanted to know if all foreigners were striped or just me. When I rose from washing my hair and body to move to the soaking tub, the child walked over and lifted my towel. I dissolved in laughter, Her mother dissolved in humiliation. It took the intervention of several other women to help the woman understand I wasn't angry but thought the child wonderfully natural. We became fast friends.

I traveled throughout Japan. I loved the mountains, the temples, the shoreline. Everything but always feeling like a stranger.

When it was time to leave, when my two-year program was finished, and when the Japanese government issued orders for me to return home, I do so aboard a ship. On the dock were my friends, those I had to leave behind. I was alone on the deck of a large immigrant ship taking Japanese to Brazil. I threw paper streamers to my friends. We held onto our ends until the ship pulled away from the dock and the streamers broke.

That day I turned my face toward home, but I left my heart in Japan. I've been back many times since, but it was never the same. I could never again be a stranger in the strangest land I could have imagined. I miss my naivete.