Summer
by Lee Ellen Shoemaker
I. All summer long, my little brother Buddy and I roamed our neighborhood, sifting through the trash piled in incinerators behind houses. Curious about other people’s trash, we carefully examined what people threw away. We looked for stuff we could use or fix or play with. Along the way we knocked on back doors and asked for empty pop bottles. At Hynds Corner Drugstore, two blocks from our house and catty-cornered from Columbian Grade School, we could get two cents apiece for the empties. Five returned bottles bought us each a strawberry ice cream cone or a grape popsicle.
We toured the alleys together, Buddy pulling his red Radio Flyer wagon until he got too tired to walk, then I pulled him. We searched for anything worn out or ripped up that contained pretty colors or missing parts. I carried a stick to poke things I hesitated to touch. We named the objects we knew and discussed the possible use of the items we couldn’t identify. We especially liked finding broken stuff we imagined we could fix. Empty food cartons and tin cans with the labels still on were saved for playing grocery store.
II. We sometimes walked five blocks to Shirley’s Furniture Store hoping to find a big, empty wood refrigerator crate. When we found one, we dragged it home in the street over the asphalt roadway pavement. The loud scraping noise could be heard a block away.
Those wooden crates were lots of fun. We made clubhouses, forts, a grocery store counter, a barn for milk cows, pigs and chickens, and a doghouse. Each thing we imagined together magically transformed our crate.
For a while, our mother would put up with the crate killing the grass. Then, scolding as she pulled it apart, she put the wooden slats and wire in our incinerator at the alley.
III. One time we made a funhouse in our two-car garage. We nailed cardboard inside the windows to make the garage real dark. We arranged chunks of wood, mounds of rags and pieces of junk on the garage floor to make a bumpy path for Buddy’s wagon. We charged neighbor kids five cents apiece to ride round in the wagon in the dark. We pulled them, jerking them over bumps, yanking them from side to side and making ghostly moans and frightening screams all the while. The rides got shorter as day progressed and longer as the rider yelled for more. The Fun House Ride was a modest financial success.
IV. Summer evenings, we played “ditch ‘em” a game of hide and seek. We usually played in and around the school yard near our house. The few kids who played softball until it got too dark, usually joined in. We used “one potato, two potato, three potato four…” choosing rhyme to determine who would be “it” to begin. The big sycamore tree near the softball backstop always marked “home” and the edges of the school yard, out of bounds. We hid in the school entrance, the coal bin entry, behind or sometimes up in the many schoolyard trees. The last player found becomes the winner.
Once my little brother Buddy won by hiding on the school’s third floor outside wrought iron fire escape. No one expected such a little kid to climb way up there. After that, he always hid there. After telling him a few times that it was out of bounds we just let him go there. He wouldn’t come down until everyone else was found. He probably thought he won every time.
Sometimes, if enough kids had bikes with them, we played ditch ’em riding our bikes. We decided which streets marked the edge of fair territory for hiding on bikes. We usually covered a several block area. Someone always “forgot” and hid too far away. Not seen until “outy outy all in free” called the end of bike ditch ’em did they come back.
V. Softball. I loved to play, but the boys older than me would never let me join them. When the other players, my age or younger played, they would choose me first to be on their side. Too chubby to run fast, I almost always hit a home run. I show-off strutted around the bases as the outfielders ran way across the school yard towards the street. I didn’t think much about it at the time, but I was always the only girl playing. Buddy was too young to hit the ball with a bat, but he thought he was in the outfield no matter which side was up to bat.
VI. The street we lived on had brick sidewalks, no good for roller skating. The closest smooth pavement was the basketball court in the schoolyard. We carried our skates with the straps buckled together, slung over a shoulder. If we arrived at the paved schoolyard basketball court before any basketball players, we sat on the benches made from bark-covered logs to fasten our skates to the soles of our shoes. Most of us carried our skate keys around the neck on a plastic lanyard. We braided our lanyards from plastic strips at city parks outdoor summer day camps held on school grounds. Mine was red and white.
If two or three boys were already practicing dribbling and shooting baskets at one end of the cement court, we would skate on the other end. If enough basketball players showed up to make two teams, we knew they would chase us off if we didn’t automatically yield to them. Some of us hung around to chase out of bounds basketballs just to get a thank you from the players.
VII. After the City of Kokomo replaced some of the brick sidewalks with cement, Buddy and I discovered newly paved sidewalks just three blocks from our house. These unbelievably smooth sidewalks contained Silicarb, a combination of silicon and carbon that sparkles in sunlight. We skated so fast we created a vortex of cool air surrounding us. We were no longer hot, poor, fatherless children. We were falcons, soaring over diamonds.
Lee Ellen Shoemaker resides in San Francisco. In her mid-fifties, Lee Ellen became The Tunnel Singer, an ambient musician. When a movement disorder, spasmodic dysphonia, disabled her voice, her journal writing evolved into personal narrative and fiction writing. Her turbulent early life and persistent curiosity continue to inspire stories and poems. Writing provides fulfillment formerly found by creating music.
