Flashback Friday: 1987? 1986?

I am not really sure what year this photo was taken, I think it was either the summer before Grade 4 or grade 3 perhaps (?), so that would have been 1987 or '86. Definitely looks like my gr. 4 haircut. This picture was taken in the forest behind my Gramma's house. Every summer when I was a kid, my Mom and my three siblings and I would make the trip to her farm for a week or two. When we got slightly older, my older sister and I got to go for a week by ourselves before Mom and the younger two came up.

My dress was white with multi-coloured pastel polka dots, and I LOVED it. The necklace I got on that trip from my great-aunt in town, it had huge paisley-covered beads on it, and the chain was some sort of weird black rubbery-substance. Later on in high school I tried to make it into something cooler by taking the beads off the rubber-chain, but it didn't work out too well. Somewhere at my parents' house in my boxes of stuff I haven't yet collected for adulthood, I'm sure those beads still exist.

Summertime visits to Gramma's were so wonderful, it was like a step back in time. My Gramma still cooks on a woodstove, still has all her old dishes and furniture and things like that. Her summer porch was devoted to our playroom when we visited, and she was always careful to save bits and pieces of things she thought we'd like to play with... be it junk mail or old cards or those fake keys you get from Ed McMahon. We played store, we played school, we played "olden days." She got some old desks from an old one-room school and set them up for us, they were perfect for everything we liked to play.

Don't you like my knee-high socks scrunched down around my ankles?