What was, is.

Things I totally dug as a child:

• pen pals.  I got those matches from the International Pen Friends thing in the backs of magazines, where you sent them a dollar and they sent you back tiny slips of paper with a name of someone in another country.  I wrote a lot of letters, despite the fact that my mom hated buying stamps.  (Clearly, I began annoying her early in life.)
• Snakes.  And bugs.  And puppies.  And horses.  And birds, and kittens, and chickens, and bats....and animals, okay?  I loved me some critters.
• Nature study.  I was that kid that saved up to buy field guides...and used them.  I spent hours looking at puddles, with all the water-striders and weird larvae, and who spent more time outside than inside.
• Books.  I was an avid reader.  And that's an understatement.  At one point, I was trying to read all the adult books in the library, in the fiction section, beginning with A.  I think I made it to D before I found boys.  I was, like, eleven-ish.
• Bikes.  I loved them more at my grandmother's house, since she lived in a small town and I could just take off and ride around all day long unsupervised.  At home, I wasn't allowed to go across the busy street near my house.  So I did that.  A lot.  I was grounded a lot, too.
• Clubs.  I had this thing about joining.  Go figure.  Or just making them up if they didn't exist.
• Newspapers...and papers, in general.  I had a neighborhood newsletter, but my parents wouldn't give me money to photocopy it.  So I started a fourth grade science newsletter instead, which I drew by hand and mimeographed in the office.  I started self-publishing before it was a trend, yo.
• Rocks and stamps.  I collected both.  The nerd was strong with me, even then.
• Stories.  I wrote a romance novel when I was twelve.  It was awful.  But I did go to the state Young Author's Conference twice -- one of my award-winning bits actually contained the line, "What a feast!  Roast beast!"  I think it was about Thanksgiving.  The rest of the masterpiece was lost to the ravages of time, sadly.
• Erasers and little miniature stuff.  My love for shaped and/or scented erasers is the stuff of legend.  I'd bike to the K-Mart and buy ten of them for a dollar and spend the next week squealing.  (Sadly, I would probably still squeal like that for erasers.)

I'm pretty sure it's my version of a midlife crisis, but I'm totally digging all of this stuff again.  

(Or, y'know, never quit digging it.)

I look at this list and I'm kind of realizing how all of them wove threads through the rest of my life so far.  I still have stacks of books.  I'd still have a zoo in my house if I could.  I still write stories.  I have boxes and boxes of rocks.  I'm in a naturalist training program.  I'd bike all day, if it wouldn't kill me.

And all of it still makes me happy.

Which, I guess, is the whole point.