Summer Communion

I was thinking of being six years old and a member of a two person club, the California Condors. The name was everything we needed, based on a semi-mythical and nearly extinct bird with a wingspan longer by three feet than that of the best NBA players. And California conjured exotic landscapes, far from the rolling hills of Western Wisconsin and Eastern Minnesota, rising up and watching over each side of the Mississippi River.

I swam in the Mississippi  and would dare myself to open eyes under water, though mostly finding a silty darkness looking back at me. Once, briefly, I shared my inner tube on a tributary, the Black River, with a long water snake. I caught it on my shin, legs bent over the tube, butt hanging in the holy center, and kicked it in the air, watching it arc and splash down river while I screamed and it did whatever the equivalent snake sound of horror might be.

Hot summer evenings, at dusk, in those, the days of laCrosse Encephalitis,  brought the mosquito spraying truck through our neighborhood, first spraying one side of the street, then the other. It made a particular deep, sonorous hum that attracted groups of children, not unlike an ice cream truck with its creepy tunes. We would chase it and feel the poison mist falling gently on our faces and scrawny, bare arms and legs. Probably our parents were never aware of this pastime. My mother, who was up every day at 5 o'clock AM to braid my hair, make breakfast, make lunches, then work all day and come home to make dinner and clean the house was likely at this point in the evening curled into a corner of the couch watching Hawaii Five-0, as well she should have been.

My tree house had a ladder and a trap door. Inside was a musty carpet and homemade curtains on each of the four square windows. Daddy Long-Legs considered it their vacation home of choice. One of the neighbor boys used to catch Daddy Long-Legs and chase me and my friends then pull their legs out. I suspect large, angry Daddy Long-Legs will be a prominent part of the Karmic payback for many a neighborhood boy, come judgement day.

My father would stand outside on summer days after work, shaking his fist and swearing in German at the deer eating his tomato plants and flowers. They would stare back at him like a pack of teenagers, unconcernedly chewing. My job was to lug the watering can up and down our steep hill to water the plants. I also mowed the lawn and at least once during every four hour mowing session, the mower would take off on some hillside and threaten to slice off a body part and I would run in the other direction until I was sure I could turn back and catch the thing on my own terms and keeping all of my toes. I hated accidentally running over toads, and was constantly stopping to move those guys out of the way.

On hot summer days growing up, I ran all the time. Walking was inefficient and a waste of my little muscled, mosquito-bitten stick legs. I ran to kick the can. I ran for Allie-Allie-in-come-free. I ran through the sprinkler. I ran and dove upon the three Slip-n-Slides laid in an epic, yellow Slip-n-Slide row, inevitably drawing blood on the jagged sharp edges where the water sprayed out.

My Mom played catch with me, her arm informed by her days as the only girl playing for New York City's Little League. She played shortstop. I played softball, and was the pitcher. My mother once convinced me to eat a plate of disgusting canned spinach because it would do for my arms what it did for Popeye's.

Not to brag but we rode our bikes all day long and without helmets. We skated and skate-boarded without pads. We had exactly two choices on a hot summer day:
1) Go outside and play
2) Or I will find something* for you to do

*involving miserable house cleaning chores
* we did NOT have play-dates**

**I wonder... were play-dates the beginning of the end of Homo sapiens ability to survive in the wild?

I was thinking about my friend and I being California Condors. Soon after, she moved to Idaho and the day she left I watched her climb up into her family's truck and I cried.

I do not recall the California Condors having any specific mission. We just flew free, in Zips sneakers, for hours, by ourselves outside. Likely we were watched more than we realized by our parents and neighbors, but it felt like we were soaring independently, with endless wing spans, coming in for a landing only when we felt the animal urge for Red Kool-Aid and fresh baked chocolate chip cookies. My Mom even had one of those glass pitchers, as in the advertisements, with large ice cubes clinking as she poured the summer's wine, like communion, into our dixie-cup chalices.