August Slipped Away

I wasn’t planning on dedicating this week’s post to what you’re about to read, but a moment from last Sunday evening hasn’t been able to get out of my head. It keeps popping up, unbidden yet not unwelcome. So, I do what any writer does, when a topic continues to circle their brain: I get it out of my head and onto a page.

Here’s what happened.

It was getting on to nine o’clock, and that’s right around the time the dog likes to go out for his last potty before bed. It’s not a responsibility that always falls to me, but I was available and happy enough to do it. Out we went, then, for no more than a minute.

And the night air was delightfully pleasant. Cool, after a warm, summer day. August is here, obviously, and I’ve never been much of a fan of this time of the year. The days are oppressive, swampy and heavy, and the sun too bright. Lately, the weather hasn’t been terrible, though, and the evenings have been lovelier for it.

So, I’m out with the dog, standing on the sidewalk near the front door as I wait for him to pick his spot. For whatever reason, I’m not sure why I did this, I stepped, briefly, onto the grass. Barefoot, just real quick-like, and then back onto the cement. That single moment has been living rent-free in my head since then.

Because it was like that scene from Ratatouille, when the critic takes a bite of the food and it zips him back in time to his boyhood home, his mother’s cooking and her kindness. That touch of grass felt just like a childhood summer. Was soft on my skin, lush and light. And I had the mad impulse to race around the yard, like I might have done as a kid with my siblings.

We lived out in the country, and, oh, did we have space to run. Between the yard and the pastures, where the sheep grazed and chewed their cud and followed us around, we made nine acres feel like twenty. In the woods and in the trees and around the firepit and even through the cornfield that wasn’t ours but, hey, it led to the swamp, didn’t it? Sometimes you just had to poke around the swamp, okay?

So much time was spent outside because summers were split between chores and play. The animals, the garden, the lawn—all of that was a tackled team-effort. All of it was not in the house. And you could make worlds for yourself, when you built a fort in the trees. When you crawled into the heart of the lilac bush.

Outside could even be where you slept, if rain wasn’t in the forecast. Our family had a large tent, which always strikes me as amusing to think back on because we were not a camping crew. Camping vacations—heck, vacations—were never our thing, and to this day I love not camping.

But I was absolutely part of the trio of kids pitching the tent in the backyard, grabbing my sleeping bag and blankets from my bedroom, and staying out there all night. The tent was spacious, could sleep, like, eight grown people, and even had a doggy door. We may not have been campers, but we’ve always been dog people. Four-legged friends were most definitely welcomed to the sleep-out.

There’d be entire weeks we wouldn’t sleep in our beds. The only rule was that you had to move locations from one night to the next, find a different section of yard to rest upon so we wouldn’t kill the grass in any one spot. But, hey, once the tent’s up, you just pick it up by one corner and the other siblings pick it up by two others. Easy peasy.

All this—and a lot more—I was thinking about Sunday evening, and, once I let the dog back in, I texted my husband and said, I just let Larry out & the air is nice & cool. And I stepped barefoot onto the grass, which was also refreshing, and it hit me how little time I spend outside in the evening in the summer when that was every day in my childhood. Now I can’t think of the last time I ran around in the grass at dusk. Isn’t that funny to be on my mind out of nowhere?

It reminds me of something I wrote my last year of undergrad, a small piece that came about after I’d eaten some raspberries I’d bought on a whim. It’s very Proustian, like how his narrator begins his drawn-out (and tedious, I might add) tale of his youth because he eats a madeleine cookie and can’t help but think of a specific time in his boyhood. That’s me with raspberries. That’s me with cool grass underfoot on an August night.

There’s plenty of my childhood that was unpleasant to the point that I don’t wish I was the little girl of my memories, running around a sheep farm and opting for hard ground instead of a soft mattress, but that girl, that time, has been on my mind. Maybe because I don’t know what to do with her? Maybe because there is nothing to do?

Or maybe it’s because the things I want to do, actions reawakened by memories, are things that aren’t achievable right now. Because do you know what I’d like?

I’d like to take a bucket of baseballs, go out into the front yard among the apple trees after dinner with my brother, and take turns pitching to one another. I’ll throw every ball and help with gathering them all up again so I can have my chance at-bat.

I’d like to take turns on the tire swing, all three of us goofin’ around. We could situate the swing so it was up in the tree, climb on up, position ourselves in the tire, and push off. Hands-down the best way to take your turn, though you had to be careful not to bash your head into the tree trunk when you swung back towards it.

I’d like a cup of rhubarb slush, a treat I’ve never had—or found—anywhere other than at home. The best comparison I can make is that it’s similar to shaved ice. Mom would make it by the Kemps icecream bucketful. You’d scrape out enough to fill your cup at least halfway and then pour Sprite over top. She no longer makes it or any of her other rhubarb goodies because she doesn’t have a gigantic plant, anymore.

I’d like to sit around a backyard fire, put my feet up to rest on rocks we kids placed to form that containing circle. It was one of the first things we made that fall we moved in. We put in plenty of fence posts and built pastures for future sheep—and we made time for this fire ring. And, when dusk sets in and the night cools off, it’s cozy and comforting to lean into the heat from that crackling orange.

It’s funny how sometimes the smells and tastes and feels of childhood pounce on you from seemingly nowhere. It’s actually quite odd, to me, that the nostalgia has found me in August. The summer and I are not friends, to put it mildly, and it’s the ‘ber months that get me in the honey-nut-feelios.

So, I’m treating these unexpected, fond remembrances this week as the gift that they are. Summer is winding down (thank goodness for that), and this is my reminder to slow down. To note how the evening air smells just like it did when I was eight. To delight in how I could still run around the yard, grass between my toes, if I so choose. To put this all down into words, though it means this blog post isn’t explicitly writing-related, because these are the days I’ve been living and the things I’ve been feeling.

We are either quick to move on from the past or we linger too long in what we can’t get back, but I want to situate myself somewhere in the middle. I like that I can step out into the yard with the dog tonight, take a deep breath, and be just a little haunted by the ghost of a younger me. It’s like the opposite of how it is when you’re a kid. You wonder who it is you’ll be, when you grow up. What you’ll do and where you’ll live and whether or not all your dreams come true. You can’t see it clearly, so you just hope.

Well, it’s nice to know, as a grown lady, that the grass is still soft, the air still cool and light, and that we’re still dog people. I can only hope all future August evenings may be as kind and sweet.