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Walks to the Bus Stop When I was in elementary school, I had to walk about a half mile from my house to the bus stop. My mom would send me out probably a half hour to an hour before the bus was to come. It always took me such a long time to get there because there was so much to look at. The first place I would pass on my way to the bus stop was our neighbors horses. In the springtime they would have so many colts running around and playing. I would always stop and grab a bunch of green weeds on my side of the fence and feed the horses. The colts would run around and feed from their mother's milk. In the winter there would always be a countless number of frozen over puddles. I felt obligated to break the ice on the surface of the puddle. Sometimes I would try to find the thickest piece of ice and then smash it on the road. When it was warm enough, I would always encounter plenty of bugs crawling around on the ground, and countless anthills. I liked to control the little bug's direction by putting a stick in his way. I would also stir up the ant hills and watch them get mad and crawl around. The worst that I would do is get the ants really mad and then drop a little black bug in the middle of the mad ants. I guess it was not quite the study of the ants natural habitat that you would see on National Geographic. Sometimes my dog, Hanko, would follow me. He was a beagle and a pretty smart one too. I was the smallest kid at our bus stop. I was scared of these big kids but I will never forget what happened my first day there. One of the kids, he was only a year older than me, walked up to me and said, "Let's see you try to bend my finger." So I walked up to him and bent his finger back and he yelped. That was the end of me being scared. After that, I never really had a bad time at the bus stop again. My favorite game we would play at the bus stop was hid and go seek. Now we would never actually hide because there was no where you could hide in or under or behind. We would all just run on the other side of the fence or behind a tree. The person that was IT had to tag one of us and a bunch of us kids would go sailing over the fence to make it to the stop sign, which was our safe zone. The other game we would play a lot was a type of tag but you used a big rock. The person who was it had the rock on the ground and had to push it with their foot to make it tag some one else's foot. Since the rock was so heavy it made it hard to push fast. That made it easy for everyone else to dodge the rock and show of how good they were at getting close to the rock without getting tagged. After a few of these fun games, the big, yellow bus would eventually show up and we would pile in for the trip to school. As the bus pulled away onto the road, I would always look back at the bus stop and wonder just how cool it would be if the bus never showed up and we could play there all day. |