Aah, the 70's

I have often found that sometimes you have to be aware of where you have been to figure out where you are going in life. So, this is my beginning.....
I was born in the 1970’s and raised in Southwest Florida in a sleepy old circus town off the Gulf of Mexico. The majority of my childhood was spent in a little white house we rented in the middle of town on a busy four lane road. The weather was always hot and muggy and my neighborhood didn't have a lot of kids, but, it was clean and safe and home for now.
Aah, the 70’s. Gas guzzling station wagons (ours was lime green with crank style windows and vinyl seats that literally burned your ass off in the hot Florida sun), the word, Green, was just a color to most people and not a way of life, and kids actually played outside and drank out of garden hoses and still lived to tell about it.
My life pretty much revolved around two things:
My bicycle - It was quite a beauty! It was a Schwinn with a long sparkly blue seat and crinkled blue and white streamers on the handles. I would race it up and down on the uneven sidewalk never paying much attention to stop signs or people passing by.
My roller skates - They were dingy white with long laces and dark blue wheels. They never pivoted well and always hurt my ankles but that never stopped me from spending endless hours in our driveway practicing tricks for the skating rink. If the kitchen door opened and my mom brought me out a popsicle, well, that made the whole experience even better!
If there was an economic crisis going on in our house, my parents never let us know about it. There was always dinner on the table, Christmas presents under the tree and new Easter dresses every year. They managed to send my sister and I to catholic schools and the trade off was not going on too many vacations or really having anything extravagant that I can remember. That suited me just fine. I either did not know any better or was truly content with what we had.
Did the world have issues then? Sure, but, the little girl with the long golden blond hair racing down that busy sidewalk NEVER thought about it. Nixon,the energy crisis, or the inflation rate...Never, not even once! It didn’t matter to me that our faith in the government was at an all time low as a result of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. No, the 70’s were all about hot & sunny days, orange popsicles dripping down my arm and those dingy white roller skates with long laces and dark blue wheels!