Our childhood didn’t get saved in the cloud.
We don’t have an archive of stories with every school break and thousands of photos from each day of vacation, but for some reason, we still remember everything down to the details.
School without phones, but with Tetris and Tamagotchis. No social media, but thick notebooks where we seriously answered the big questions of life: who your best friend is and who you love.
During breaks, we played with stickers and chips, tossed our change, and did a lot of things that would definitely end up in parents’ chats today.
The yard was our second home. Literally.
The whole asphalt was marked with squares or hopscotch. Girls jumped rope, boys played soccer until dusk, and then we all played hide and seek or any games whose rules somehow got passed from yard to yard across cities without the internet.
Nobody really had trendy toys. But everyone had metal swings, rusty spider webs, and slides that got so hot in the summer you couldn’t touch them. After all, playgrounds back then were designed not for fun, but for survival training.
That’s why we loved running across garage roofs, climbing construction sites, exploring nettle patches with a stick, blowing up carbide in bottles, and throwing metal 'Ш' letters like boomerangs that for some reason littered the city.
We grew up without the internet, without mobile phones, and I didn’t even have a landline. So it was quicker to run to a friend’s house, knock on the door, or just shout to him from the street.
And every summer, in this typical yard for the whole country, the same big crew would gather: kids from neighboring houses and other cities, whose parents sent them to stay with their grandparents for the holidays.
There was a lot of fun, wildness, and danger. But there was freedom, independence, friendship, the ability to negotiate, fall down, heal ourselves with plantain, get smacked, make up, and explore this world.
I’m glad this time didn’t get saved in the cloud; perhaps because of that, it’s preserved in us in perfect quality.
We don’t have an archive of stories with every school break and thousands of photos from each day of vacation, but for some reason, we still remember everything down to the details.
School without phones, but with Tetris and Tamagotchis. No social media, but thick notebooks where we seriously answered the big questions of life: who your best friend is and who you love.
During breaks, we played with stickers and chips, tossed our change, and did a lot of things that would definitely end up in parents’ chats today.
The yard was our second home. Literally.
The whole asphalt was marked with squares or hopscotch. Girls jumped rope, boys played soccer until dusk, and then we all played hide and seek or any games whose rules somehow got passed from yard to yard across cities without the internet.
Nobody really had trendy toys. But everyone had metal swings, rusty spider webs, and slides that got so hot in the summer you couldn’t touch them. After all, playgrounds back then were designed not for fun, but for survival training.
That’s why we loved running across garage roofs, climbing construction sites, exploring nettle patches with a stick, blowing up carbide in bottles, and throwing metal 'Ш' letters like boomerangs that for some reason littered the city.
We grew up without the internet, without mobile phones, and I didn’t even have a landline. So it was quicker to run to a friend’s house, knock on the door, or just shout to him from the street.
And every summer, in this typical yard for the whole country, the same big crew would gather: kids from neighboring houses and other cities, whose parents sent them to stay with their grandparents for the holidays.
There was a lot of fun, wildness, and danger. But there was freedom, independence, friendship, the ability to negotiate, fall down, heal ourselves with plantain, get smacked, make up, and explore this world.
I’m glad this time didn’t get saved in the cloud; perhaps because of that, it’s preserved in us in perfect quality.