Living with my grandparents out of state for 3 mos. It’s what I’d look forward to the other 9 mos. of the year. My grandpa would drive from his state to ours, stay a week and then take me back home with him, we’d make a week long road trip out of it, ritualistically stopping at the same places, usually family haunts and retelling family stories as we went.
There was a lot of driving into mountains to go fishing, exploring for treasures on abandoned farms/houses, visiting elderly relatives, all the comic books I could read, all the candy I could discover in 7–11 stores, all the different flavored sodas on the market and all the foods I was curious about not allowed in my own vegetarian household.
My grandparents taught me socialize, it was called visiting people or going to town. They taught me to work, how to count money, how to keep a savings, what bills looked like and who you pay them to, how to sew, cook, clean, swim, fish, drive, shoot, throw knives and lots of history of America stuff- as they’d known it. They were the best days of my young life.