Rememberment, Chapter XXXII: Summer Fun

I spent some of my most memorable summers at my aunt's countryside home. Often there was a whole bunch of kids; Jari and Juha (my cousins, who used to break my toys at Christmas), Jukka (with whom I had the long road trip), Ilkka and Tiina (cousins of Jari and Juha from their dad's side) and sometimes even Jani, Marko and Mika, my older cousins from Sweden.

The summer of '88 was a fun one. Elementary school was over for me, so when my aunt and her husband left us alone for a weekend, my cousins decided it was time to celebrate the occasion in the most Finnish way possible.

There was an old junk car in the woods nearby, and my craftly cousins had prepared a bucket full of prison wine in its trunk. And so we went upstairs into their room, put on some Samantha Fox tunes and started to party. I didn't need much to get a nice buzz going (imagine that - I was a scrawny little 12-year old after all) so when my mom suddenly called to check on me, Jari's face turned pale.

I didn't even begin to know how to pretend to be sober, but Mom was a good sport. She let me believe she didn't notice anything, and only brought it up years later.

We had other kinds of fun as well. Ilkka (who was a year older than me, same as Jari) was born with the gift of climbing  - up trees, to be exact - and would terrify the rest of us by picking the tallest spruce in the woods to climb, all the way up. Once he came back down, he often had his pockets full of crow's eggs.

There was also a field car and a track made for it, and boy did we drive - I bet the dust cloud we created was visible to the whole village. There was also a lot of badminton, swimming, fishing and roasting sausages over the fire; when it rained, we stayed inside watching movies or playing computer games (particularly a game called Decathlon, where the gameplay consisted solely of waggling the joystick as fast as possible; the game usually ended when either our wrists or the game controllers gave up).

Sometimes we also got together to play water poker: whoever had the worst hand after the round had to pick up a card from the deck, which dictated how many cups of water they had to drink.

I guess making ourselves puke was some of the most fun we could think of.