Popsicle Days

We would sit on the porch most afternoons, orange Popsicle dripping onto the concrete step below, forming sticky puddles between our bare feet while Trina kept us enchanted by her tales of love in the house down the street. She and the youngest Miller boy slipping their hands over bare skin while Victoria plotted how we might get back at those girls who would usurp our place with the boys on the park bench.

Maybe spray paint their names on the factory wall. Or slash their bicycle tires.

In those days, though, it might have been Patti or Donna (we had so much to say then) sitting on the merry-go-round slowly moving it with our feet, picking at the red-painted metal bars. Talking about boys. Talking about the neighborhood. Some days standing around the swing set we watched the older boys rolling cigarettes under the pavilion and listening to their low voices murmuring through the air like water.

When we felt young, we threw sand on the metal slide, played pick up sticks on the merry go round, pumped the swings until our heads swirled and then jumped off into the dry yellowed grass.

Once I told my cousin she had to throw a rotted apple through Mr. Miller’s car window to join our gang and being from out of town she complied.

And that was not nice of me.

So I went to confession.

Father Emil was not nice either. He named his dog Nero and let him run around the neighborhood nipping at the hillbilly kids as they tumbled down the slide.

In those days my crush was a boy with the bluest eye and hair like silk. Jerry lived across from the park, cooed my name, smiled widely, laughed like a girl.

The last time I saw Jerry we walked up to the high school together, the cheap art and the cheaper fair food far behind us and the excitement of a dark parking lot in front but he said I was too nice and left me there.

He must have had some inkling, if not the intellect or vocabulary, that I was out of place. Even as we sat together all those summers before. In the park, under the pavilion, scratching our names into the picnic table with pocketknives and keys.

I don’t know what became of Jerry or Trina or Victoria or the girls whose tires wobbled as they toppled to the ground.

I lost track not long after Ben was killed and now Shane is gone too – Lupus they said. Donna, I heard, married one of those park boys but me and Patti, blood linked as we are, don’t talk much about those summer days before the streetlights came on. Before Grandma stood at the corner calling us home.

And though we were only a block away, in the park, on the bench, under the pavilion, carving names and talking nonsense, we were a world away from her and our future selves sitting here now with little more in common than our formative years.