Let Me Tell You A Story

FUN WHEN I WAS SICK When I was a little girl, I didn't live in a house. I lived in an apartment in the city. The apartment building where I lived was three stories high. Four families lived on each floor of the apartment building. I lived on the second floor of the apartment building, on the middle floor. My room had no door and no wall on one side. It had windows all around on three sides. I had two friends on my street. They were both boys. There were no girls on my street. One boy, Stephen, lived in the apartment above me and the other boy, Donald, lived in the apartment building next door. We did not have a big yard to play in, but there was a place between the apartment buildings that had sidewalks. We would play there and ride our bikes on the sidewalks while our mothers washed clothes in the basement and hung them outside to dry. Our parents would not let us go out of our buildings by ourselves, because the city was big and we were little. The streets had lots of cars going by all the time. So, we played in the building hallways and under the stairs that went from one floor to the next. There was a set of front stairs and a set of back stairs. We would hide under the stairs and play make-believe. It was lots of fun. Sometimes, when the weather was cold we would go to the basement furnace room to play, but it was very dirty there. Our mothers would make us come out if they found out we were there. Stephen and I were best friends. We played together every day. We didn't have television when I was a kid. We listened to the radio or played records on our record players. There were story hours on the radio and we would sit on the floor and listen to the story time shows every week. We also liked to play house or other make-believe games.