Most children are taught, inadvertently, to hate the rain. They hear the adults in their lives bemoan a rainy day and watch them mope and complain that there's nothing to do because "it's raining". I don't care a whole lot for it if it's cold and I have to be out in it, but if it's a friendly, warm rain, and the day is mine to do with as I choose, then it's welcomed - not as much as a sunny day - but welcome for itself and the break it can provide.

In our childhood summers, Grampa Roy would let my brother, Larry, and me run in the warm summer rains, providing it wasn't a thunder storm. We'd jump into our bathing suits and run, jump and squeal in the downpour, and the mud puddles. We knew it was a special treat from Grampa because the other Ridge kids weren't allowed to..."they might get wet". Grampa reasoned rain water wasn't any more harmful than lake or bath water, and it provided a whale of a good time in the pre tv-video-computer days.

We were only allowed to play out in the warm rains, though. At this time of year, the cold rains meant another special treat; the cook-room chamber. (Back then the porch was called a "piazza", or the "veranda." The living room was the "sittin' room" and the kitchen was the "cook room"). The only room in the farmhouse that had an attic space was the cook room. This space was called the cook-room chamber and was reached through a cubby-hole type door on the second floor landing.

The chimney from the Clarion wood (cook) stove in the cook-room came up through the chamber on it's way to the roof, providing an envelope of warmth. The rain-song on the shingled roof and the single window in the peak providing light that spilled over the treasure-filled trunks completed the rainy day haven for kids - and farm cats.

There was a whisker to whisker size hole in the wall of the adjacent woodshed. A for-real catwalk...a board about 2" wide, stretched across the top beams in the woodshed to the rug-flapped entrance. Any cat worth his salt could maneuver it but it kept other animals out.

Generations of old photos, letters, a half-finished, hand stitched baby quilt in "Grandma's Garden" pattern, books, old uniforms and great grammie's clothes, a few ingots of lead that became bars of silver, in our imagination, from the Lone Ranger's silver mine - of course, WE were the Lone Ranger and Tonto andthese were for mkaing the silver bullets -  jewelry and  the usual flotsam and jetsam, and some not so usual.

In a glassed case was a stuffed two-headed baby pig that both fascinated and horrified me. Grampa told me that the mother pig, in nature's sometimes cruel wisdom, had deliberately smothered it with her body. I couldn't understand why nature would produce something if it wasn't meant to exist in the first place only to have it "corrected" by the horrific act of maternal infanticide. I would study the little stuffed body and not be able to see anything ugly about it. To me it was just as cute as any other piglet, everything perfectly formed. It just happened to have two heads.

But the very favorite treasure was the stacks and stacks of National Geographic. There weren't many other magazines during the war that printed quality four-color photos, and they added to the fascination.

Our imaginations knew no boundaries as the tiny cook-room chamber filled with loin clothed pygmies and black panthers of South America and lions from African jungles, the brightly colored costumes of Lapps from Norway, Charros from South America, Eskimos and polar bears, kangaroos and eucalyptus trees, real American Indians, archaeological digs of ancient civilizations. They all became real in the cook-room chamber. Some issues went all the way back to articles written by The Rough Rider himself, Teddy Roosevelt, before he was President. Rear Admiral Byrd and "Lucky Lindy" were among the authors who shared their adventures with us.

Some say that to take away the t.v., the stereo, the VCR, the computer games and the skateboards from today's kids would render them stumped for something to do. That might be so, but aren't those t.v.'s, etc., the cook-room chambers for the imagination of todays kids?

Now if they could all just have a Grampa Roy.                      mt