Summer

I saw my father in the summertime only, between age 6 and age 12.  Those Grand Rapids summers felt like a separate timeline, as if the airplane were really a time machine.  My big sister and I would get put into the time machine just after school ended, and two hours later we would find ourselves in a different family with a different mother and little sisters who speak Latvian, in a hot, rudely racist city instead of the politely racist, lily-white boondocks of our schooldays in rural Maine.  I'd pick up right where I left off, as if I'd never left these alternate best friends nine months before: sweet, clever Beverly across Sutton SW with her geeky, curly-haired big brother and her kind, boozy single mom in the stereotypical house dress, and nasty talking Janet on my side of the street with her buzz-cut hooligan brothers and her terrifying (dare I say menacing) evangelical parents.

It was always steamy and sizzling back then, unlike now.  Are summers milder?  Or is it just that back then we cooled ourselves in front of fans, most of us, while talking into the spinning blades in that way that fragments sound, just to amuse ourselves and pass the time.  Janet's family did have a huge air conditioning unit in their living room, the only one in the neighborhood.  But their blinds were always drawn, and neighbor children were rarely allowed to enter the house.  I remember enduring a dim, chilly bible-reading in that cool, dark room one time, the price of admission.  It felt like a funeral parlor, like you could almost see a coffin, and I never went back.  Usually we all met outside, on porches and in the street, where summer is meant to be lived, and I still prefer a living demon humidity to a dead god chill because of my memory of that room.  I still don't like AC. 

Also during those Michigan summers, my sister and I attended the local pool for Red Cross swimming lessons and free pool time after.  Either the water was kept icy, or I was just very susceptible to cold.  Ever the free-range child, I rarely remembered to bring a towel or a change of clothes to the pool.  I would get blue-lips shivering with cold, being what even my friends called a "shrimp," and leave the pool from time to time craving warmth and finding no towel.  So I'd crawl to the nearest dry patch of concrete, immediately plaster my face and body against it, splayed out, cheek and chest and wrist warming to the radiant substance beneath me.  I loved that sensation no end.  I'd close my eyes, soak up the heat, and breathe in that distinct smell of chlorinated water, summer skin and baking concrete.

The poolside warming ritual came back to me in a rush the other day when I smelled that smell.  And I missed her yet again, that girl I was when summers were alternate yet endless.