Shortly after we moved to the farm, Dan and I were taken by the thought that we had no neighbors at all, nobody could hear us, so why not go up behind the barn and scream as loud as we could?

It was a sort of an attempt to celebrate the fact that we were living way out in the country. Years later, when I moved from an apartment where I always had to be careful not to make noise or tread heavily on the floor, to a house where I could make a lot of noise, I did. Sometimes I would drop a box on the floor just because I could; no downstairs neighbor to bang on their ceiling.

So Dan and I celebrated our release from close neighborhood confinement by screaming as loud as we could.

And somehow it never occurred to us that there were actually two humans within earshot, the parents. And the parents flipped out, came running to see what was the matter, figuring that something truly godawful had happened, attack from mythical bears, severed limbs, or worse.

And we had to explain our idea: to scream loud because we could. I think if we had truly permissive parents they might have said, now that we know, go right ahead. But they were really angry and not feeling permissive. 

I can only imagine the discussion that went on between them later trying to figure out if they had raised two complete idiots, casting possibly permanent doubt on our odds of growing up successfully.