you don't know what you've got 'till it's gone

[nova33]

I’m having the oddest homesickness lately. I’m missing summer, not as they would be now if I was back home, but how they once were. Nostalgia, I suppose you could call it. The long days spent at the park down the street, having crab-apple fights that always finished in tears. We ended up at the wading pool, bright blue paint, blinding in the sunlight, chips floating up and sticking to our wet skin as we cooled off, sharing our space with the littlest kids and burning in the sun. We played basketball on the courts at the park, or silly games at the neighbours’ nets, joking around and making up the rules as we went along, games that would become favourites, games we would remember years later, past their expiration date. We had water fights, best guns not always winning, because there was something to be said for sneakiness. Contests to get control of the hose, water sprayed up to the sky, into the sun; it left patterns across the road and sparkled in the air, created rainbows, just for a second. The tar on the streets, filling in the cracks - it burned our feet, but we walked along it anyway, like tight-rope walkers, precarious without arms stretched out for balance. (Later, our feet would be filthy, flecked with black, and our feet would stick to the cool tiles in the kitchen as we took the carton of popsicles from the freezer.) We caught frogs by the river, with our two-dollar nets and our cracked buckets, wading through the reeds with the mud cool between our toes. The water sloshed up just under our knees and tickled our skin - our legs were distorted, wavy, under the water, a murky brown colour. Hair plastered to our skin, trudging up the bank to the trees, lying in the grass and listening to the frogs jump around in the bucket. Our feet were crusted in mud, dried in the sun to a pale colour, and when the frogs found their way out, we were too tired to follow. When the sun started to set we played capture the flag across four backyards, where the street was safety and jail was sitting on the front steps, waiting to be rescued. We played until it was dark, every day, until we were called in for the last time.

I miss those days. I would miss those days, I think, if I was back there now. When it was easy, when there was no appropriate and inappropriate, no expectations, no cool and uncool. We just were. Before paintball and sneaking out basement windows in the middle of the night and cutting up trees in the woods and putting firecrackers in frogs’ mouths and using crab apples and slingshots to hit baby squirrels and before war movies and homemade napalm. Before, before, before.