War Games

I started this blog to commit myself to write every day. A noble goal. However, sometimes I am not sure of what to write about. Today was one of those days. However, when I saw this picture, I experienced a bright flashback of a memory of a time of day, a place and a season that looked just like the picture. I was a sophomore in high school in 1961. For the first three years of high school, I lived in a seminary (we called it a Juniorate), studying to be a Brother of the Sacred Heart. St. Joseph's Juniorate was on a 78 acre plot of land on Plainfield Avenue on the side of a railroad track in Metuchen, New Jersey. (It is now St. Joseph's High School.) The entrance to the Juniorate was two long roads lined with huge tulip trees and led to the main house, a light brown structure with two brick wings. The left wing housed the chapel, the right wing, classrooms, dining room and kitchen, and dormitory on the third floor. The older structure that linked these two brick buildings housed the brothers and the novices. There was also a farm, barn, cemetery, basketball courts, sports fields, and open field leading to a pond at the back of the property. On the left side was a pine alley, a vineyard and an apple orchard. It was behind this apple orchard that a stream ran from the front to the back of the property.

In the winter, when the ground was covered with snow, we would go into these woods behind the apple orchard and build snow forts on both banks of the stream. When they were built, we played "capture the flag" until the sun set in the west. These games were raucous and filled the woods with testosterone and laughter. In order to capture the flag, we had to ford the stream to get to the enemy fort. And we had to do this under a hail of snowballs from the enemy fort. Many was time that one or more of us ended up sliding down the bank and into the frozen stream and forced to walk back to the house at sunset, drenched through to the skin and freezing cold. And that is what this picture reminded me of tonight. A game in the snow when I was but fifteen years of age and careless of time and tide. A game played almost fifty years ago.