Walking to school with worms

Up until towards the end of 5th grade, I walked to school, in Hudson Iowa. We lived in the "new addition," which was on the other side of Highway 63 from the school. We would cut through our neighbors' yard behind us, stopping to say hi to their German shepherd. Then we would walk down the street past the house where a teenager adopted from Korea lived, past the Allred's (some people in our ward who I used to babysit, when I was younger than 10, until one of the boys climbed up the metal shelving in the basement and spilled a 5 gallon jar of honey all over the braided rug, knocking over the whole shelving unit and shattering the jar into a million pieces). That was probably the first time I was fired for doing a bad job, but as a nine year old I learned a few good life lessons, that have really impacted my life. 1) Nine year olds are old enough to babysit 4 younger children. 2) The top shelf of a rickety metal shelving unit is not a good place for a 5 gallon jar of honey. 3) Shelving units should be secured to the wall when small children live in the same house. But the really great thing about he Allreds is that they were really wacky and a lot of fun and we played a really awesome card game called scoop like solitaire where each person has their own deck but you can discard your cards on anyone else's stacks in the middle.
Back to walking to school. When we got to the corner where the Brekhousen's (where we went for Brownies) lived we turned left. Sometimes Carrie and Andrew Jones would join us, and then we would pick up Elicia and Heather King. There was this house across from the King's where some mysterious teenagers lived who were always getting their trees TP'ed. One thing that really sticks out is the smell of the worms on the road after a good rain. We would talk about night crawlers and how they have to come out because the ground is too full of water and how if you chop them in half they keep living, and we trying not to step on them. I remember rounding this one corner where lightening hit a tree one night and half of it was strewn across the road and the people were trying to clean it up. When we got to the end of that street we would walk through this chain-link fenced path up to where the happy professional crossing guard would help us cross Highway 63. She always wore orange and had an orange whistle and orange whistle earrings to match. I remember when I was in third grade I weighed 63 pounds and I thought I was so clever when I figured out that, "I weigh 63" sounds like "Highway 63."