It the neighborhood where I grew up it was quite hilly. Mountainous, maybe. But there was one place that was flat. It was about half an acre and was just across the hollow from our house, so we played there a lot. We called it the flat place because there was only one. It was good for running around, but not wide enough for a ball game.

One time we spent all day Saturday building a "house" out of cardboard and 1X2 wooden strips. A neighbor thought it was an eyesore and burned it down.

After Christmas, we all took our old dried out cedars over to the flat place and piled them up. Then we spent a week searching all over the neighborhood for other discarded Christmas trees. Sometimes the pile would be quite large. Then at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve, we would put a match to them and start the next year with a humdinger of a bon fire.

In wet weather, there was a spring that ran a tickle of water right across the middle of the flat place. We found that by digging a channel about an inch deep and maybe two or three inches wide, we could float a toy boat all the way across. We always made them wind back and forth a bit, just to make it more interesting. At the lower edge of the flat place, where the water got lost in the weeds and seeped down into the hollow, the boats would stop. So we would grab them and run back to the spring to float down again. As flat as the flat place was, there was still enough gradient to make the water flow across, but in that hilly area, it was hardly noticed.

I went back to the old neighborhood about 20 years later and there was a house on the flat place.
Howard