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Favorite Hangouts

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We have purple grapes hanging all over the place on our deck. They were particularly plenteous this year because of our snow last winter and the summer rains. You can see some of them in the header photo. The late fall migrants as well as the birds who stay around all winter have been gathering in droves to eat them. I used to make grape jelly but we don’t eat that much jelly, and a little grape jelly goes a long way, so we leave them for the birds. The grapes will dry and be a nice food source for them and the squirrels all winter. Squirrels have also made off with all the nuts on our hazel shrubs. I hope they ate them and didn’t just bury them in random places like they usually do.

Birds like to congregate in our yard with all the shrubs and protection from the wind as well as the feeders. We use black oil sunflower seeds in the feeders. I don’t care if the squirrels eat them, since they get hungry, too. I like our yard being a favorite hangout. Husband and I sat on the deck this afternoon in the calm, sunny weather listening to all the bird song after finishing our winter preparations for the yard. It was lovely.

Where were your favorite hangouts as a kid and as a teenager?

32 thoughts on “Favorite Hangouts”

  1. As a kid: anywhere in the yard because we played outside a lot. The local park about 4 blocks away. Had a great sledding hill. Was the hub of the city-sponsored park program where a counselor or two would work at the park all day and organize informal events and activities for us (sort of like a recreational daycare facility).

    Certain friends’ houses/yards were fun to hang out at as a teenager because the houses were bigger, “fancier”, and just different from my house.

    I was a rink rat on Saturdays in winter at C&C field (baseball in summer, hockey in winter) but was a terrible skater/player. Just loved hockey. Still do.

    Chris in Owatonna

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  2. A Moorhead/Fargo Red River flooding project from the early ’60s, put a large area of dump-truck sized mounds of river bottom clay into the Woodlawn Park area. This was the FM poor side of town. The area became the site of forts and pitched battles. I won’t go so far as to claim being in a gang but in this hangout the cry, “Andersons!” got everyone ready with clay balls. The four Anderson kids were bullies from a little bit higher up the hill to the south. Their invasion of our turf required action. Without superior numbers we were frequently driven off. But now and then an Anderson would get hit in the face and flee crying toward his home. Not exactly West Side Story intense but after all we’re Scandinavians. Minnesota semi-nice.

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  3. I remember being at the old Y (YM/YWCA) fairly often, at leas when we had our weekly meetings. There was a ping pong table, and room to try out the latest dance steps. This was a gorgeous old brick building downtown, with wide wooden steps to the upper floors. It’s also where we played church league basketball (the only girls’ b’ball at the time) and had Saturday Nighters dances.

    The building was of course replaced in the 70s by a soulless, more efficient Y..

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  4. As a young teenager in the Los Angeles suburbs (so many decades ago), I studied research material to learn what real teenage life was going to be like. My material was Archie comic books, in which the Malt Shop figured prominently as a venue for antics.
    So, when an establishment with that very name opened up next to the Sears store at a nearby mall, I frequented it for a few weeks to make connections.
    Alas, nobody else did, and the few things I purchased to consume while waiting drained my meager finances.
    Favorite hangouts? I guess church, which may account for my subsequent professional ikfe as a member of the clergy.

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  6. Hangout as a child was about 800 acres of woods around our farm. As a teenager it shrunk down to the farm when I was do much more work and more adult work.
    There was a teen center in town, a nice one at that. Did not go there often. Just not time. Trying to think now if there was any place we went that was our place once we got cars. We were involved in sports, plays, music, not all of us in all of that. And most of had jobs of sorts. Lots of places, no hangout.
    Clyde

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  7. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

    In High School I was a denizen of the Band Room, as well as the hallway outside the Band Room where our lockers were housed. I would also escape to my friend Joliene’s house via the back alleys when running away from a certain boy who would not take “NO” for an answer. However, my mom caught on to that one, and would call over to Joliene’s house insisting that I return home because she was tired of hanging out with this guy for me. Usually I tried to keep most of my friends away from my house because my sister was so weird, my mother was a teacher who would remind my friends of that, and my uncle, the HIgh School history teacher would be there playing Cribbage with my dad and a neighbor. It was just too much teacher energy at my house.

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  8. When the drinking age in SD was 18 and it was 21 in MN, lots of teens would flock just over the border to a little bar in Valley Springs. The drinking age was lowered to 18 briefly when I was in high school.

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    2. I’ve actually BEEN to Valley Springs and spent the night there many times between 1986 and 2018. Once, on the way out of town, I purposely headed east of a little road and couldn’t even feel the bump when I crossed the state line. to think that it was once a Mecca for Minnesota teens speaks to a certain amount of desperation.

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        1. My mother grew up near Worthington, but left there at age 17 to become a Californian. I remember visits when I was a kid. but those ended in the mid-60s.

          The little colony of misplaced NW Iowa Dutch people in and around Valley Springs had a church there. A friend was the pastor in the mid 80s, so the church took a support share in our work. It was my privilege to visit every few years and tell them about Taiwan. The women of that church sent us packages of American groceries every year for Christmas until about 2014.

          Little country churches, especially “ethnic” ones, have trouble continuing. The last time I was there, maybe 2016, they had a part-time pastor who lived in the parsonage and worked in an office supply store in the city. On my last visit, the entire operation looked, if not abandoned, then but “not much used”.

          In 1986 I spoke at some kind of missionary event in a church, either in Luverne or in Chandler…. I can’t remember which.

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    2. We did that in Faribault too, on Central Avenue downtown. Around and around in a loop, waving at all our friends. I got “mooned” once.

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  11. I remember playing in the woods as a kid. Then it was either Neighbor Steve’s or Mike’s house.
    Then Pete’s house.
    In high school, once I started doing auditorium work, we’d hang out with Art, the school district repair guy. He was the one that showed us how things worked in the auditorium, so he had all the keys. plus he had a shop in the building to repair projectors and such. Every day it seems, he’d say “Put your finger here.” And you’d reach in and he’d slap it away. “Don’t touch that!”. Still makes me laugh.
    We make name badges using that gizmo that traced a plastic stencil to create the plastic name badge. Created our own auditorium badge; “Acoustical and Illumination Technical Engineer”.
    If Art wasn’t in, we’d bother the band teacher, Lanny.

    for a lot of years it was the barn and the East window where I spent a lot of time.

    Nowdays, I spend a lot of time sitting in the shop pondering all the stuff to do yet.
    And that side door with the dogs.

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  12. Well, there were the slumber parties – rotated through a group of about 8 of us. Landed at our house once, and we slept in the basement somehow, where we had a second fireplace. One time we snuck out in middle of night and TP’d Kenny P’s front yard.

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  13. Pit parties were common in my years as a student and my years as a teacher. Drinking parties in one of the many gravel pits in the area. One death resulted from that when I was a teacher. He was beyond HS years. Driving too fast on dark gravel roads he did not know.

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    1. Our long quiet driveway used to be a party spot for a few years. We finally installed the gates to stop that.
      The deputies had a good time breaking up parties on the fieldroads of our place. Some good stories from them.
      Not that I never took a girl down some quiet field road of course… 🙂

      But no wild parties for me in the fields.

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  14. The mile long county to our farm started from the other side with a steep climb up to a point that overlooked the town and Lake Superior. It was a prime make out place until other houses besides ours began to be built on the road.

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  15. We shall hang out at home later this week, as we could get 6 inches of snow Thursday.

    Kids here gather at the Green River for parties, a secluded spot on the banks of a small stream east of town.

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  16. One of the houses we lived in, in Jefferson City, had a two-story garage, but it was built on a hill so the car entered on the street side but then on the yard side, there was a door that went into a storage area that we called the Playhouse. This was a favorite neighborhood hang out when we lived there a couple of years. In high school I ran with the theater set and you can’t imagine the excuses we came up with to have to be at the school on the weekends. Working on this set or that set or lights or painting or practicing. And one of my theater friends’ father owned an Italian restaurant. We hung out there a lot too.

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  17. The best swimming beach was at the end of a long dike that extends into the St. Croix river. I always thought of the dike as just the road that led to the beach. Much later I found out that it was built to lead to a toll bridge in the early 20th century.

    There was a little cafe called Dibbo’s where you could get a good sandwich for a couple of bucks. I still remember some of the songs on the jukebox. The Allman Brothers, and Jeannie Pruitt.

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  18. A day late to the party.

    My favorite “hang-outs” were near our home on Cannon Lake. In the summers the young teens hung out on the community-owned raft that was anchored out in the lake in deep water. We swam and dived off the raft and laid in the sun. We even slept out there on a few nights in August when the meteor showers were supposed to be active. It was a very memorable place for a young teen.

    I also liked hanging out in the barn on the farm across the road. I had two horses: a 7/8 Arab gelding (I called him Ben) and an older Shetland-Welsh pony (Chief). Chief was the orneriest horse I ever dealt with. He’d suck in air and blow himself up when I tried to saddle him. I’d have to wait and tighten the girth or get on and expect the saddle to slide around when he released the air. Someone told me to kick him in the stomach but I couldn’t do it, even though he wouldn’t hesitate to bite or kick at me. Then he’d buck and buck and buck in repeated attempts to throw me off. He was just plain ornery. I loved him. I loved Ben too and as I got older and more experienced, I rode him more. I also loved watching the sows give birth to adorable piglets; helping to feed several young steers who loved to suck on my fingers; and watching Mr. Christie heave two full bushel baskets onto his thin, 80-year old shoulders and walk them back to the barn so there would be corn in the barn. I cleaned the stalls for all the that horses boarded there, helped with the sows and the young steers and helped scatter corn for the chickens. The barn was a peaceful, sweet smelling place and I learned a lot there.

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