THE DITCH

One thing (call it a joy) that I remember from my boyhood in Corbin, Kansas was the ditch!

Where I lived in that tiny town in Sumner County, there were only dirt roads.  Oh, they were covered with gravel to stem erosion, I suppose, but they were still the victims of Summer downpours.  And that was always a happy time for me and my friends.

The closest swimming pool was miles away in Wellington and the one in Caldwell had yet to open (1956 I'm told by my friend Suzie).  And if you wanted to swim in the local river (The Chikaskia), well, you needed someone to take you there...…….So, we just waited for rain.  Rain that would fill the ditches and create our swimming hole.  Now the ditches were not deep, ("no diving" was not even a thought) but they held enough water to cool you off and let you splash about...…..Granted, it was a tad muddy, but that came with the territory.

There were several boards that spanned the ditch to enable one to cross without having to jump over it and these doubled as our "diving boards."  You simply stood on the boards and fell forward (or backward) to see who could make the biggest splash.   Many a cloudy day after the rainfall was spent in sheer delight "swimming" in the "ditch."

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