Tag: summer
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A Line at Twin Rivers
I look up from my watch and hock a wad of phlegm into the mulch trying to seem more ticked off than I am because we’d been standing in line for forty-five endless minutes. I could have watched half a movie in this time. I keep thinking about and that thought makes me irritable. So…
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Diving Sticks and Other Recollections of Public Pools
I once cracked open a diving stick and emptied the sand from it for no good reason. I walk past the fence of the public pool and am hit with a burning sensation within the caverns of my nostrils from the day I first jumped into deep water without holding my nose. Instinct exhales the…
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Middleton
Middle age endows its members with, amongst strands of grey, bushels of gifts. Most are neglected, others embraced, but none must go unnoticed. Years accumulate, begging the excavation of long-buried relics—memories tucked under blankets of time. Unlike meticulously dusted deposits of Jurassic carbon, the artifacts of days past have a tendency to uproot hurriedly from…
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Fruit Punch and Rotten Eggs
Each year, word of Miss Karen’s pool parties circled like buzzards at bus stops. It flowed through the halls of the elementary school like an unseen current humming through electrical wires. Third graders told incoming second graders who were lucky enough to have been assigned Miss Karen’s class about the end-of-the-year bash in hushed tones…
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Texting Harriet Greer
Jordan Gregg moved in about a month before the end of the school year. Mom found the timing of The Gregg’s move the sort of odd that borders on downright scandalous, what with enrolling two kids at Glenville just weeks before summer break. I’d been at camp for half the summer and up at my…
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A Deeper Shade of Blue
The only thing Lindsey wants is a big old stick of blue cotton candy. It’s all she talks about the whole car ride. It had to be blue. If any color had a biggest fan, that color was blue and that fan was my little sister. She keeps going off about how she doesn’t like…
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Nature’s Farthings
An unending summer is as rare as a winter wont never to cease. Spring grasses are ever wet and a phantom chill assails autumn gusts. To live where we lived for our sole year, where nature endows ample and nearly equal time to each of the quarterly climes indeed molded the memory of how the…
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Sylvan
jam on wheat sticky tiny fingers checkered picnic blanket pale green marks collect upon knees ruined Sunday’s best wooded journey opens cool clearings comfort murky forests enclose the fallen oak a prone giant still ever resilient humid afternoons serve as the onions cut making angels to cry their fat tears pelt your soft head drip…
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Willow Creek
I remember when Stacy and I would go down to Willow Creek to skip rocks. I’d get mine all the way across; hers would only travel about half the way before descending out of view. “No one’ll ever try to skip that one again,” I’d say as the stone tucked itself in to the muddy…
Sophisticating the Rudimentary 