I neglected to mention, chronicling the ways we almost killed ourselves, the times I actually got hurt. It was never anything serious and, to this day, I've never broken a bone (that I know of).
Once I fell out of a tree in the west grove. I was less than ten feet off the ground. The kicker this time was I fell into the barbed wire of the fence, threading my leg between the three strands of barbed wire. That produced a scar that I still have, though I don't think we got stitches that time.
Another time I was running against the wall of one of the sheds at our friends', the Swenkas'. A nail was sticking out and simply caught my leg as I ran by. I think we did go get stitches in it that time. I remember the anesthetic hurting quite a lot, applied multiple times with a syringe under the skin of the open wound.
I've never spent the night in the hospital (for myself). I can't believe I lived through my childhood in Iowa, and the kind of stunts we pulled, with so few injuries.
