juvenescence: tales of boyhood

Summertime Simplicity

It was a day like this, the sky couldn’t decide if it wanted to spit or shine; I’d seen my first rainbow, the only one I can remember as a child. They’d been more colorful in the books, and children’s movies. Still, there the blurry thing was, pouring out from a secret spout in the clouds, cascading down into the trailer park. I wondered if the people there had turned rainbow colors, though I’d barely even noticed black and white.

I’m sure god entered my thoughts with such an odd thing coming from the heavens. I didn’t think much upon leprechauns or unicorns as a boy, but even then, god and I were going ‘round as I poked holes in his stories with pointed questions, questions which when asked, I was told to just believe, to have faith.

My friend lived there in the trailer park, his name now faded into memory’s smudgy pastels. Their house was different from ours, but it hadn’t occurred to me that they were poor, nor had I realized that we were. We all just got by, not knowing any different. There were always kids to play with, an adventure to be had, doing something we’d been told not to do.

Up the road a bit, was where Ann-Marie lived. She had straight brown hair and constellations of freckles formed lovely galaxies across her nose and round cheeks. We’d spend many summer afternoons swimming in her pool, laughing and splashing. Her Irish Setter amused himself in the clover-flower yard eating bees as we swam, and we’d giggle at the faces he made when a bee bit him back. We’d draw or read books together, drinking lemonade, if the sun got the best of us, and we understood each others childhood silence.

She had a thing for me, but I was too young to muck it up with the sticky-shoe residue which comes with adult love. Though I wondered later, finding myself again wishing on fading rainbows, if that summertime simplicity shared between two pure souls wasn’t what love should be, until I’d met a woman who’d make me stop wondering, showing me.