Summer days again, school days some more

Revisiting some poems that celebrate the between-time of summer turning to fall

Photo by Katherine Hanlon on Unsplash

I published this post first in August 2023, celebrating this liminal season when summer isn’t over yet but school has begun in lots of places and back-to-school preparations have started everywhere. I like these poems, and the kid who features in them; they, and she, deserve to be introduced to all the new friends I’ve made here over the last twelve months, and to exchange high-fives with the long-time friends they met the first time around.

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Both these poems were written earlier this year [2023], and both describe memories from around the same time in my childhood: the first a completely characteristic picture of the kid I was, the second a one-off experience. Both have stayed fresh in my mind for years.

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HUT


I am ten years old, curled on my side,
lying on red dirt and dry grass
inside a round squat heap of a hut,

built with a friend bored on a sleepover;  
framed in long bendy branches joined at the top,
small branches woven crosswise, and spread over all

heaps of dried pine needles, raked up and wheelbarrowed
from under the giant trees near the woodpile
back down the deer-trail to where the hut now stands,

frail and sturdy and mine, all mine – 
the friend gone home, politely scarcely missed,
while I strengthen the frame, heap the pine needles thicker,

nestle into the space inside where two
could sit but one can stretch and breathe deep, 
can lie on her side holding a library book

or letting it fall closed, reading about Laura Ingalls
or Mary Poppins or watching sunlight shift
through layer on angled layer of piney dust,

can sit up turning empty pages in a notebook
with a purple cover, the secret notebook I hide here
in a secret place, its pages waiting for secret knowledge

I don’t know how to gather or write down:
knowledge of magic, of daily skills and powers,
knowledge echoed in the songs we sing in Sunday school,

knowledge that could draw back the curtains
in that house a hundred steps away where my father
and mother live, shadowed and cold in their silence – 

while here between more fragile walls
the silence is warm and scented as summer,
and all the knowledge that I lack and long for

folds between the covers of an empty notebook,
hides deep in a heap of brown pine needles,
their dust still fragrant with the long life of trees.

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BUBBLES


Spring afternoon, a light breeze, and you a fifth-grader
on the green stairstep fields behind your school,
showing your best friend what you have brought from home – 
the red plastic bottle with cartoon bubbles on the label
and a thin soap-slick wand inside. You tease the wand up
into sticky fingers, dip, and blow, and your friend laughs aloud
as breath and breeze send fragile glinting globes into the air
and up across the grass. You dip again and hold the wand aloft
to catch the next small gust; nothing happens, and is that when you,
who rarely choose to, begin to run? And which is more surprising,
your new momentum, or the dazzling bubble-cloud that swirls
behind you, between field and sky? Two kids playing catch
join your friend as she runs after, then another three
from the jump-rope game on the blacktop, more catch sight
of the commotion and follow, and next time you wave your wand
you are running at the head of a crowd, their hands held high
to catch the uncatchable, their faces raised to a spring day’s sun
glancing off bright curves of barely-there; you are the pied piper,
the enchantress, you with your round belly and too-loud voice
and one friend at a time, you are the bestower of delight,
and those who follow you delighting will never know
that this moment, theirs now, was never made for them,
made instead for sun and sky and grass and breeze,
made for the bubbles, breathing them into a moment of barely-there,
a share in the spring day. And see you now, the leader
of a laughing dazzled crowd – which is not who you are,
not really, not beyond this moment, but the bubbles,
for the moment that they are, the moment that they hold
your breath, are still themselves.

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[You can listen to an audio version of the poems using the little widget above the photograph.]

What’s a non-military word for the construction that most kids, boys and girls, called a “fort” when I was growing up?

What’s any kind of word for the sensation experienced by an introvert who suddenly finds herself (for, say, five minutes) very truly run after?

I settled on “hut” to answer the first question; still unsure how to answer the second. Still bemused by the different forms that happiness can take, the different ways that it filters in to warm and illuminate a patch of life. My childhood had its shadows — everyone’s did; they need to be reckoned with, the children we were deserve as much. And at a certain point in the reckoning, other memories waken and insist on other truths: here’s a place where you felt supremely safe, here’s a moment when you got to make magic. Here is light in play with the shadows, each as real as the other, each part of the story that’s yours to live and to tell.