I was just sitting here thinking of my youth..remembering all the fun I used to have with my friends and my sister during the summer.

I was a tomboy. Yes sirree! I didn't flinch at the thought of climbing bluffs in search of dinosaur bones, or freak out when a bug crawled across my foot while I was playing hide and seek. I didn't mind it if it suddenly rained. We just ran around like monkeys and got soaking wet. It was like playing in the sprinkler...only better.

I remember one summer when my best friends (both boys) made the coolest fort I had ever seen. It was in the kudzu. They and their dad had hollowed a huge area of kudzu and made tunnels through it and little rooms under hidden bushes covered in the vine. After you got through the tunnels and to the edge of the patch, they had a rope swing that you would use to swing off into a deep ditch where we would drop off and run around to the front to start all over again.

I remember one summer when we all went swimming at the Shiner's pool (Grandaddy was a Shriner) and I was in love with a lifeguard. I had to have been about twelve, but I tried every trick in the book to get him to notice me. Well, everything but accidental drowning.

I did, however, jump off the high dive and when I came up, I noticed him staring at me. I was so thrilled....until I noticed that my bathing suit top had fallen down.

As a kid, I climbed trees, "free as a song," as Ray Stevens would say. I loved sitting up in the limbs, reading a book and feeling the swaying of the tree in the wind. I'd sit up there for hours, just-a reading.

I really miss being a kid. I miss being able to climb a tree. Can't now, what with being so overweight and all. I miss my best friends, who are now husbands and dads themselves. I haven't spoken to them in years and I really regret that.

I remember going to my first concert: The Village People. Gloria Gaynor of the "I Will Survive" fame opened up for them and it was the coolest thing ever. I was invited to go by my friend, Christina, who later asked another girl to go see the BeeGees with her. I was so jealous.

What are some of your favorite childhood memories?