It once was said that youth is wasted on the young. The beauty of youth is indeed its naiveté. Regardless of how miraculous one’s physical body performs, if you know what can happen – “know” as in understand in the depths of your bones and not just “know” as in having an intellectual understanding of the laws of physics – then you will hold back, you will hesitate if only for a moment, and that moment is the difference between youth and age.

I tell my students that you will know you have reached a “certain age” of life when your buddies suggest some wild and crazy activity, let’s say ice climbing or hang gliding, and you begin to calculate what will happen to your life if you get hurt and cannot work. I’m convinced a mortgage has saved many people from orthopedic purgatory.

Still, there are some not-so-risky things that we enjoy in our youth, our childhood, that should be the same when we’re older, but sadly they are not. I had this thought the other day when I brought home two boxes of Girl Scout cookies.

No offense to the budding young women in the green uniforms, but Girl Scout cookies do not taste as good now as they did when I was a kid. Yes, it’s the same recipe. It’s the same “cookie,” but the experience is different. As a kid, the cookies were doled out one or two at a time, they were rewards. Now, I have a whole box to myself. I can eat as many as I want in one sitting, and if I run out, I can buy another box myself. And, since I learned to put them in the freezer, I can have them year-round. It kind of defeats the whole purpose.

Snow cream is another childhood delight that has been ruined by adult sensibility. As a kid, my mom made snow cream with raw eggs, and we all lined up for a bowl, and then we would each try a different flavoring in ours and pass around a taste of it. Now, we are told, correctly so, that you can get salmonella poisoning from raw eggs. And, of course, the Chicken Littles of the world such as my husband must rush to remind us that all sorts of pollutants are in the air, and we could be ingesting unknown dangerous toxins. So, these days, I make snow cream without raw eggs, and I eat it alone. It’s not nearly as much fun.

Along those same lines, I loved scary movies as a kid. My mom and I watched them together, while my daddy would give commentary about how the monster on screen wasn’t real. Scary movies aren’t what they used to be. Now, they look real, but there is no suspense. You know what’s going to happen. Besides, blood looks different in color than it did in black and white. Scary movies are lost to me forever.

Of course, I can still enjoy my favorite childhood indulgence – sleeping late – except when I can’t, which, unfortunately, is most of the time. As a kid, I could sleep till noon on Saturday mornings. These days, I wake up for a bathroom break at 6 a.m. and then even if I fall back asleep, I’m usually awake again by nine. And, if I stay in the bed much longer than that, my hips make me sorry.

Yes, youth is wasted on the young. They don’t know what they have, and that’s the best part of it.

A lifelong resident of Caldwell County, freelance writer Deanna Chester resides in Lenoir with her husband John, two cats, and two dogs Petey and Daisy. Her column, Spunk & Spice, can be found the second and fourth Sunday of the month in the News-Topic.