Memories Rewind: Who needs a Dollhouse when You've got a Soybean Mill?

Some girls play in doll houses, but when you live in the country you take what you can get.

As soon as I got home from school, I'd go play. One day my brother was wandering around outside and I wanted to tag along. We saw our daddy's soy bean silo. All it took was one look, and curiosity got the best of us. My brother climbed the ladder first. I was cautious, but he was a gentleman and helped me down.

Once inside, it was great. Granted, it wasn't the pink doll house with black shutters that I'd always wanted, but it had space--and lots of it. We could be whatever we wanted to be in there. Superman and his trusty side kick could save innocent bystanders from the burning building, we could have put shows...or we could play with each other. What a concept!

Sometimes, we'd sit and talk. Since it was so deep our voices would echo. Being the boy that he is, he loved to see who could scream the loudest. Of course he didn't say, "Let's have a screaming contest." He'd just start screaming. Then I'd scream. If someone would've have passed by the silo they would've thought something was wrong.

Other times, we'd pretend we were farm workers filling the soy bean silo to the top. My brother liked to climb the sides. Those were the days of simple clean fun. We didn't have a video game system 10 years ago to entertain us. We used our imagination. We didn't spend hours texting, either.

To the naked eye, the silo looked like a big hunk of metal coming out of the ground, but to a kid the possibilities are endless. Once I imagined I was Rapunzel and I let my long hair flow down the ladder. Since we'd found out that a soy bean silo wasn't just for beans, we made it our mission to go there every day. It was our secret hideout. We had hours of uninterrupted play time that turned into some of my best childhood memories.