On cold days like this one, Alice and I stayed inside to play. I remember a lot of those days, but there must not have been so many because we would have been in school. Alice liked to play with paper dolls - you know, the kind where you cut out the paper clothing and use the little tabs to attach the clothing to the dolls. I never saw much point in it. The doll was one-dimensional and couldn't bend or move around anyway. Then, you put an outfit on her and what could she do? Nothing. Then you took that outfit off and put on another one. B-o-r-i-n-g!

I much preferred the not so cold days in the fall when the leaves had fallen and we could play outside. Sally Ann had a very deep back yard with a wonderful tree with limbs just right for kids to climb on. In fact, each of us who played on that tree had his/her own limb. Of course, Sally Ann had the best one; it went out for a ways and then branched into a "y" so you could hang upside down and do various tricks on it. And it wasn't too far from the ground, in case you fell, which we did sometimes. The rest of us had to get permission from Sally Ann to play on her limb.

One of our favorite games at Sally Ann's was Follow the Leader. Now, Larry lived for a time in the other side of Alice's duplex, and he was an only child with a said-to-be alcoholic father, Herman, and mother, Pearl, who watched his every move from the swing on the duplex front porch. Larry wore glasses that were as thick as Coke bottles (the glass kind, you know, like we had back then when the Coke tasted better than it does now). Before Larry came over to play, Sally Ann, Alice, and I would dig some holes in the yard, fill them with leaves, and tell Larry we were going to play Follow the Leader. The leader would manage to barely avoid the leaf-filled holes, but Larry would step in them every time! We would howl with laughter, and Larry would start to cry. Then, his mother would start yelling, asking us what we had done to him. We would tell her we were just playing a game and didn't know what was wrong with Larry. Wasn't that mean? And Larry was even nice to me the last time I saw him, which was probably 25 years ago. He should have shoved me into a hole then and there!

At one point, Sally Ann's father decided to make some extra money and raise chinchillas for the fur. Now, he built a fairly nice house for the chinchillas to live in; it even had air conditioning. We didn't have air conditioning in our houses, but the chinchillas did, so we spent considerable time in their house playing dolls and even dressing up Sally Ann's cats in doll clothes. I wonder what the two types of animals thought about each other. The chinchillas were in cages, so they never got very close to the cats. I really hated it when his chinchilla enterprise came to an end; I don't know if it didn't generate the money he had hoped or what, but we really missed the cool air.