THE MAGICAL JOYS OF SUMMER

THE MAGICAL JOYS OF SUMMER 

BY HEIDI JOHNSON-WRIGHT

The summer just before I turned eight years old was magical. Many mornings I awoke to the shimmery song of cicadas, the background music of Cleveland summers. Our house was on a street that had been developed for years, but just a block away was several miles of woods. Within a year or two it would sprout tract houses like mushrooms. Until then, it was my private nature preserve.

I spent many days divining careful paths among the trees, stepping over fallen branches, enchanted by the oblique angle of sunbeams through the canopy. My dad had taught me basics about botany and bugs, showed me where to look for little treasures. Green May apples grew under bowed leaves near the forest floor. Spider webs glistened with dew.  An overturned log would reveal a world of grubs, worms and scurrying wood lice. I would find sassafras trees, crush a few of their hand-shaped leaves between my fingers and drink in the earthy smell of tea.

In June, I went with my dad to city hall to buy a pool pass. A functionary upsold us on a season pass for the whole family for $40. My dad went for it, and a few minutes later, I was holding a warm laminated piece of pink cardboard. It was my ticket to unlimited admissions to the public pool at the end of our street. Although my sister and brother went just a few times, and my parents never went, my dad more than got his money’s worth from me alone.

I often went to the pool three times a day. After my morning swim class, I came home for lunch and returned in time for the 1pm opening bell. With pool pass pinned to my towel, I’d park my bike in the rack in the parking lot, and sprint into the girls’ bathroom (labeled “Gulls”; the boys’ was labeled “Buoys”) where I’d pretend to take the required pre-swim shower.

Next order of business to was to stake out a claim with my towel. Cement or grass was the choice; I almost always chose cement. Although I disliked having to exit the pool during the obligatory 20-minute adult swim each hour, I cherished stretching out on my belly on the hot pavement. The heat would immediately vaporize the droplets off my skin, filling my body with a warm, relaxing buzz like the feeling I would later get from a shot of whiskey.

My friends and I made up crazy underwater games, such as charades, seeing who could scream the loudest, and striking fashion poses. We always opened our eyes underwater and never wore goggles, nose plugs or earplugs. Such things were for sissies and losers and thus out of the question. Our hard line on this issue meant we’d return home from the pool with blood-red eyes stinging from chlorine and droplets of water temporarily obstructing our hearing.

Evenings at the pool were my favorite time. Fewer people meant shorter lines at the slide and boards, and more room to myself. As twilight began tingeing the sky with pastel pink and periwinkle, the underwater lights came on. This was the time for floating languorously on my back, gazing skyward. What would it feel like, I wondered, to ascend like the Apollo astronauts to the moon? I had savored the chewy, chocolate space sticks they ate aboard Skylab and drunk many glasses of Tang. I’d assembled a tiny toy moon rover, powered by twisting a rubber band, from a box of Cheerios. But what would it feel like if the sky was literally no longer the limit? 

When the final bell signaled closing time, my exhausted legs could barely lift me up the ladder. I felt like I’d landed on Jupiter and weighed 1,000 pounds. My three-minute bike ride home seemed infinitely long, the whole world cast in languid slow motion.  

http://earthboundtomboy.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-magical-joys-of-summer.html

Become Famous! Get Hit by a Car!

earthbound tomboy

By Heidi Johnson-Wright

 

About a week before the end of the fifth grade school year, I was hit by a car.

It was a rainy afternoon when the school day ended. I had ridden my banana seat bike to school and would now have to ride home in the rain without a jacket. I would also have to negotiate a line of backed-up traffic. In our bedroom community, nearly every mom was of the stay-at-home variety. Now a legion of them was swarming the school to pick up their kids. To let kids walk home in the rain meant they were in the same “bad mother” category as women who used Hamburger Helper as a crutch instead of making home-made meatloaf.

As I came out of the building my mom was there, with my raincoat in hand. I whined that I wanted her to put my bike in the trunk and drive me home. She insisted I would be fine on my bike, that I needed the exercise and could negotiate the half dozen blocks on my own. She was right, but something made me uneasy. I put on my coat and headed for the bike rack.

One second I was leaning over to unlock my bike, the next I was lying on pavement surrounded by a group of kneeling adults. My eyes slowly began to focus on the faces of my third grade teacher, my fifth grade teacher and my mom. I could hear people crying and sirens wailing. My mind was equally split between panic and “what the hell?”

A mother had jumped the curb with her car and mowed through the school yard. Had she wanted to inflict maximum damage, she couldn’t have picked a better spot: right through a crowd of kids at the bike rack. I had gotten a glancing blow that fractured my leg. When I fell, my head hit the pavement and I received a concussion and the retrograde amnesia that went with it. I was the second worst casualty; another little girl had actually been run over and was in critical condition.

Had I been an average kid, I would have been sent home with a simple cast and crutches and told to use my arms and other leg to get around. But the arthritis's damage to my wrists meant I couldn’t use standard crutches. Nor could my one good leg bear the weight of two. Instead, I went home with a long leg cast with a rubber heel on the bottom and a platform walker without wheels that was so heavy and primitive, it would have been better suited to Herman Munster.

The first two weeks after the accident were a non-stop procession of my parents’ friends dropping by to offer condolences and nights on the couch in agony as my tibia began to knit. By week three, the pain eased and I traded out the long cast for a below-the-knee model. It was then that I began to enjoy my new-found status as a local celebrity.

In my town, the mere possibility of a McDonald’s opening – the only chain fast food joint besides a Dairy Queen -- was cause for controversy and excitement. So it’s not hard to imagine how just being one of those girls that got hit by that car at the school upped my suburban Q score considerably. But this time my notoriety had nothing to do with my arthritis and everything to do with fame earned by mere happenstance. I was "famous" for being famous. Kind of like being a Kardashian.

Friends dropped by my house daily: close friends, casual friends, even long-lost ones. Often they had a card or a small gift, and a story or joke to share. Naturally, they wanted to hear my version of The Accident. Did I see the car flying toward me or hear the engine rev? (No and no.) Did I remember being hit? (No, but I had nightmares about menacing cars.) What was it like to ride in the ambulance? (Claustrophobic.) Did my leg itch inside the cast? (Often.)

An older sister of one of my friends worked as a summer parks employee, teaching arts and crafts to kids. Several times she brought me goodie bags loaded with supplies and trinkets from her class. Though I couldn’t get out of the house to catch butterflies, I enjoyed the treasures she brought. On hot afternoons, I sipped my mom’s sweet tea while I taught myself to make lanyards and drew pastel sketches of fuchsia plants in hanging pots.

My leg healed fine by the end of July, but the weight of the cast and my struggle to walk with it had put a lot of strain on my knee. It swelled to soft ball size and hurt like hell. I lived in daily fear that I would need to have it aspirated, a procedure in which a large needle is inserted deep into the joint and fluid is withdrawn.

I was starting junior high in the fall. Grades six through nine were housed in a building bigger than my old school, which meant a lot more walking between classes. The school was too far away to walk to it, so I’d have to depend on a bus that was supposed to change its route and stop in front of my house. I was nervous about meeting new teachers and kids, brand new people to whom I’d have to explain why I limped or why I sometimes struggled to get up out of a chair.    

The richly-symbolic menacing cars and the increasing awareness of my precarious health were always with me, in the back of my mind, as I drifted into sleep on late summer nights while the crickets chirped and the cicadas sang.