** LONG GOODBYE **

 Childhood in the countryside is still permeated and coloured with diverse pure child's pleasures. Fun is combined with useful things, though...
 Fishing, for example, or working with the horses - classic examples of this unity. However, there were dozens of other cases where children's games turned into labour or when labour quietly, without much vanity, penetrated into the children's play.
     To set up brooks and streams in early spring was the privilege of children, an occupation that is not comparable in its pleasure. Doing this, the child was not only physically hardened, not only acquired the courage to play with water, but he also brought benefits, which, perhaps, he did not even know.
     Similarly, the boy takes the cattle out to the pasture, but he also guards livestock against wolves and bears. This is something different in comparison with the boring grazing. Horseback riding and riding in a cart were for them in the beginning just riding, not transportation of hay, sheaves, manure or firewood.
 The adults encouraged such fun in every way quietly, but the adolescents have had a lot of neutral concerning the useful work games. Father and mother, older brothers and sisters, all the adults seemed not to notice the useless games, sometimes even prompted them to children, but not seriously, but just in passing. So adolescents and children learn from each other such games from generation to generation.
 Among the dozens of such entertainments was making toy windmills and watermills. To make a first simple windmill and install it on a garden fence would help an elder brother, grandfather or father. But after that, you did not want someone to help you ... So the spinner was soon replaced by a model of a genuine stamp mill with the pestles. And the stamp mill is close to the dam at the spring creek with the filler wheel mill.
 This creek has yet to make a noise, but another stream is already flowing in the forest: sweet birch juice fills a small bucket in half a day.
 There, in a broad gully showed up sour stalks of sorrel, and then arrived sweet, crunchy tubes of angelica. However, they can be eaten only when fresh, soft and juicy.
 By mowing time, they become thick and hard. If you cut the biggest lower part of the reed, leaving one end hollow, pierce it with a pine needle, twist on a willow stick grandmother's tow, you get a water intake device. After being sucked into the reed water, the boy sneaks near girls playing "scotch."
 A thin, steady trickle of water goes eight to ten meters; the girl gazed in amazement at the blue, utterly cloudless sky. Where is the rain? The same reed pipe with the closed-end, if you make a longitudinal slit with a knife and give it a sharp blow, turns into a stunning tube.
 In late summer, when ash berries became ripe, from the reed pipe was made a pneumatic device. Berries from that gun silently flew meters for twenty or thirty. Sitting in an ambush somewhere in the grass or on a tree, you can be successfully firing at roosters, cats, peers, but... Let us stop here for a moment. Remember where we started and how far we went. From a short distance from that gun, you could easily knock out the eyes, and not only to just a chicken…
 The line between good and evil is barely perceptible to the child's soul. The child crosses it with a pure heart, making it overstep (crime) into the habit. The most innocent game can slyly and silently at any time go into a prank, a prank - into self-indulgence, but a step from mischief to disorderly conduct is within reach ... Therefore, elders have always nipped in the bud pranks by nurturing and maintaining clear boundaries in children's amusements, and games - the tradition and the sanctity of rules. Yet in many places, the wire guns (it can smash a button), as well as the rubber slingshot (a pebble pierced the glass in the window), eventually replaced the innocuous reed water guns, willow whistles and carved bats. We must thank the industrialization that provided village boys with steel wire and rubber bands.
 After the First World War, in the villages also appeared adult pranksters. Of course, such a "naughty boy" did not throw stones at the windows of public buildings. But, to be safe, he deftly induced the boys to do that. Still, the fun of village children and adolescents has fully preserved their traditions down to the Second World War. The diversity and vitality of games can be explained by the centuries-old selection, the complexity and diversity of labour, the natural and living conditions. Literally, everything that comes in handy could be used…
 A grandmother had no difficulty removing the headscarf, folding it diagonally and making a "rabbit" when rag dolls "sleep" and it is not time to wake them. Next, a woman reaper made a straw doll from a handful of straw (probably from here went and "straw widow"). Straight rye stalks bent in two, tied up the "waist," and spreading its dress at the bottom, the straw doll was put on the table. If you lightly tap the countertop with the fist, the doll starts to dance.
 Now imagine a child delight at the sight of a few straw puppets dancing on the table from skillful taps on a wide tabletop! Dolls then converge, then diverge, then touch each other. Finally, they will pass each other. The goal was that they danced around each other, rather than dance away from each other and not fall off the table...
 A wood splinter was used during the winter evenings for many tricks. To make a "hummer" toy was enough to have a piece of wood shingle and a thick linen thread. The children also were making "fidget spinner," which can spin seemed for an eternity. Common were confidence games, jokes, tricks with a loop and a pair of scissors or with a circle or ring. Finally, depleted fantasy put everybody to sleep, but the next day, it always recalled something new.
 For example, "chicken" is the game when into the sleeves of an old coat or jacket were put one hand and one leg, and the coat was buttoned on the back. Such "chicken" was put "on the feet," and nothing is more ridiculous was how it set foot and fell.
 In spring in the forest and in summer during haymaking, adolescents cut down the stilts, first short and then longer. Walking on the stilts across the stinging nettles and water develops strength and endurance.
 Very funny looks a rustic leapfrog game, quite unlike this game in the city. Players gathered in the street, and a good-natured volunteer took unpleasant duties. He would sit in the center of the meadow. The players piled up all their hats on his head over his own hat. Sometimes it got pretty high; you had to sit motionless for the whole tower not to fall. Then the most robust and tall player was supposed to run and jump over. The number of dropped caps was memorized. The last to jump was the smallest player, and by this time, on the head of the sitter, could be no hats left... The losers got down on all fours. The sitter was taken by the hands and feet of four guys. Then they hard slap his butt into the back of the guy who was standing on all fours. Strikes number was made as several dropped hats. Hits were completely painless and harmless, but there has been a lot of laughing. If you hit someone standing on all fours, he moved too far ahead. The funny thing was when he set out at his former place, he looked around, wanting to know what was happening behind. Before the hit, he would change his facial expression in apprehension.
 A classic Russian summer men's game was praised by Pushkin's "bones" game." Children, adolescents and young men were equally fond of it, and in his spare time, married men were not averse to play. "The bones" were joint bones of sheep and cattle, left after cooking jelly. They were accumulated, sold and bought, they also passed on as an inheritance to the younger boys. Pushkin's "sharp" bone is nothing else as a big bull joint bone. In it was drilled a hole and filled with lead. Later, the bone was replaced by a stone, and then with iron tiles, known as "bat." On the line was set one "bone," if there are not many players, then the pair. There are several types of games. Still, for all, it was a combination of a good eye, agility and endurance. The first man who threw the "bat" the farthest was chosen to start, and from the place where it landed. In some games "bones" were put not in the line but in a column by two.
 The stake in a row would be put either against the wall or in the open. In the latter case, the second series of hits carried out from the other side. In the three-class parish schools, children memorized a poem: "On the lawn near the road a lot of kids, "bones," like in a field army lined up in a row. Oh, Paul is always lucky, he again is first. And what a rich and long today is, brothers, stake.". Continuation and the author of the poem Anfisa Ivanovna did not remember. Adult players in the "bones" game attracted a large crowd of fans on holidays - girls, family people, guests ...
The set of "bones" could rival just one game: the skittles or "gorodki." It is also a beautiful game, the only match preserved to our days and legitimized in the official list of modern sports.
 Games and popular entertainment are difficult to define or separate into something, although they existed independently, separately, and clearly delineated. This is the central paradox of traditional aesthetics. What is the rural swing? Can you describe it; identify what the main thing in them is? You can, of course, but this description is again empty and uninteresting if the reader does not know the spring in the country, the swimming week, and a village holiday.
 By the way, the swing (the circular and simple pendulum) has been widespread for a long time in the North. Around those swings in the holiday bustle, in a cheerful forgetfulness, some simple games, filled with musical content, would become rhythmic, filled with melodies and acquired traits of round dance. A child is no longer a child but a teenager if he plays in the ritual dance with a teenager of the opposite sex. This game is no longer a game but is something else. A lengthy separation from play has a typical person ... Only the broken, encrusted, aged before his time, ill or completely lost the God's spark man loses the need for play, joke, and fun.