The Hole

This pass weekend my wife and I visited the home land,New Jersey,and stayed at my brothers home. His home is the house in which I grew up in. He purchased it from my parents when they moved to Florida.

One morning I was sitting out on their deck and I had to use the bathroom, and because there were many people staying at the house, the bathroom was in constant use. Because there is only one bathroom in the house you had to make a reservation to use it. Well any way it was ocupado, so I decided that I would go,for a pee break, into the woods in the back.

The back of my brothers home there is a small ravine that all of the kids that I grew up with spent most of our childhood. We would leave the house early in the morning and not return untill dinner.

When I get together with friends from the old neighborhood, we always talk about our childhood and playing all day in "The Hole", as we use to call the raven.

The hole was a magical place for all of us kids. It was the wild wild west where we all carried our six shooters and rode our imaginary steeds. The next day we were suddenly all in the army fighting the bad guys on the battlefield. There were days when we all battled space invaders or gigantic monsters that were threatening the earth.

In the winter it was a great place to be as well. When it snowed there were plenty of places to sled ride. There was one run that we called suicide hill, that was really steep. I remember,one time, that maybe 10 kids hooked sleds together went down suicide hill hooked together. It wasn't a pretty picture at the bottom.

One summer we kids decided to build a baseball field down the hole. It was a pretty good field except right in the middle, just to the left of second base, the was a large structure that was shaped sort of like a fat bottle and it was made of cinder blocks. It was a way workers access the sewers. It was painted white and that's were we got the name for it, "white thing". Pretty inventive.....you think.

Right field was on the side of the hill that we would sled down in the winter. Left field was in wet lands, plus it had the second "white thing" in the middle. But it all worked out we had many good games down there.

We would find fossils of shells in some of the shale in the hole. It was a magical place as a kid.

It is now unrecognizable and overground and impenetrable. And as I looked out into the hole from my brothers back yard you could almost hear the voices of kids having the time of their lives.