Today I am introducing a guest blogger, my 16-year old daughter Hannah. She wrote this for a school assignment and I thought everyone would enjoy a small sampling of life as a DeVyldere kid.

Sudden Death

As kids, my brothers, sisters and I had a lot of time and very active imaginations. We could basically make any random and seemingly boring object into the subject of a most interesting game. For instance, the clay-like mud that seemed to be the chief element in the field behind our barn was harvested and taken to our makeshift potter’s shop. There it was washed (with water from buckets and saucers set out to catch the rain), purified, and made into many clumsy, yet agreeable pots, vases and various other simple structures.  These were then dried and set on display at the “Market” along with the freshly picked flowers, aromatic “lemon leaves,” sprouted wheat (grass seed, harvested from the wild stocks in our back forty), and a variety of nuts, cracked at the cement slab we named the Nutcracker.  We built tree forts, discovered our own version of the Oregon Trail, and hosted several intense boot camps. There was simply no end to the amount of activities to do and chaos to create. 

            I remember specifically one year when we got our family’s first ever trampoline. When all the excitement of unadorned jumping wore off, we naturally began testing new ideas and games such as  “Fish Out of Water,” “Deer in the Headlights,” and “Black Out.” They were all interesting, but none of them came close to the challenging thriller my older brother fashioned. The entire game was based on the concept of “skying.” Skying occurs when one person, as they are landing on the trampoline, is propelled upwards by another person, who is putting all their power into bouncing the first person up.  This gives the skyee twice as much power as they would have had originally and an awesome high flying experience. Skying is undoubtedly a fascinating subject, one that we tried to explore to the fullest. And this new game, dubbed “Sudden Death,” combined the thrill of defying gravity with the challenge of a good competition. 

            “Sudden Death” would start off with one person as “it”. That person would start the game by jumping in the air and landing on his or her back (commonly known as a back bomb). At this point they would be skyed as high as one of the other players could get them. As soon as their back left the trampoline’s black textile, their goal was to touch one of the other three children on the trampoline before they landed again. It was that trio’s job to evade them and therefore avoid being “it”. 

This was, for the most part, a safe game, at least in our minds. Of course, their were times where a youngster, when tagged, would go flying off the trampoline due to the tagger’s inability to stop himself or his flailing limbs.  As the game progressed we started to become bored with it and looked for new ways to spice it up. The brilliant idea came to those of us who were not “it” at the time. The three of us secretly plotted to all sky the back bomber at the same time which, with any luck, would provide a truly epic sky. 

This was, for the most part, a safe game, at least in our minds. 

The new round started: one, two, three! All the power the three of us could muster was successfully transferred into our temporary foe’s back bomb. We watched our handiwork sky our brother higher than we had ever seen before or could have hoped for! Then it hit us. He wasn’t going to come back down on the trampoline! I probably should have mentioned before that when being skyed, it can be extremely hard to control what you’re doing or where you are going to land. Unfortunately, this thought had not crossed our ingenious minds while planning our great caper.  We cringed as we watched our brother speed head-first for the ground.

            Fortunately, he had enough experience with skying to know how to tuck his head and turn a nose dive into a flip. He landed somewhat feet first, smacking the ground with enormous force. He laid on the ground for a while, then picked himself up. His dazed eyes went from his muddy jeans, to us, to the ground, to the trampoline, to where he had reached his peak, then back to us in a repeating cycle. I wish I would have been able to focus more on what was going on in that moment, for that was one of a very few times I have ever seen that particular brother speechless. But I was still reeling from what had happened. We had all fallen off the trampoline multiple times before, but he had reached new heights. This made him a sort of legend in our minds. 

The expressions of those who were still on the trampoline were no longer the mysterious smirks of a plotting gang. Those peculiar grins had turned to smiles of satisfaction and pride at a brilliantly planned scheme; then to the blank stare of a realized mistake, as it dawned on us that we hadn’t thought about what would happen after he was in the air. Finally our faces changed to grimaces, as the thump he made scared the birds from their trees. We couldn’t have imagined that those events might have transpired. At least we didn’t imagine them. We certainly did not intend for that chilling experience to occur. However, we felt very responsible for that frightening incident. I looked at the astounded faces of my accomplices and saw my thoughts reflected in their minds. We had just discovered the most incredible game ever!