Summers Remembered

We wear socks in the pool because we’re afraid of the bottom. It’s unpaved and would leave scratches on our feet. We take turns jumping in, plugging our noses and diving for rings. Hannah and Maya, playing in the baby pool for hours. For summers.

When the sun gets too hot and our feet get too soggy, we take our matching butterfly towels and spread them on the rocks. There we lie, with raisained hands and raccoon goggle marks around our eyes, baking in the hot July sun. Around us, mothers start packing their chairs and giving their kids the “five minute warning” but we ignore them. Hannah finds a small red rock that’s warm to the touch. She rubs it in her hand and bits of red dust stain her fingers. Like rust colored blood. We strike the rock on the stone ground, rubbing it back and forth like an eraser to produce a beautiful red stain. We add a drop of water and the stuff comes off on your hand like watercolor, perfect for applying as nail polish, lipstick, hair dye and more. That was the summer of Rock Paint.

When we reach the top of Santa Cruz hill, we start to run. All of us, scampering down the gravel road with backpacks bouncing and water bottles sloshing, intent only on reaching the house at the end of the lane. Hannah and I have matching backpacks; they are teal and shaped like an owl, with red felt ears, round black eyes and a zipper across the belly. Later I would insist that she had copied me, just as she had our matching lunch boxes, but for now we are only obsessed with being the same. 

The kids ahead of us shriek when they get there. We are in the woods by my grandparents  house, home to the garden gnomes of Church Lane. These aren’t the kind of gnomes you buy from the store, though. They’re magic. Every night, while we’re asleep, the gnomes come to life, and we know this because every morning, on our walk down Church Lane, we see they have moved.

Today, when Hannah and I push to the front of the gawking campers, we see the gnomes gathered around a large tree stump just off the road, which they appear to have been using as a table for a sumptuous feast of moss and assorted berries. Brenden says he wants to try a berry but his hand slips and knocks one of the gnomes into the dirt. We all gasp; Brenden’s breathing quickens and his eyes start to water. You see, there is only one rule on Church Lane; you cannot, under any circumstances, touch the gnomes. 

“It’s lost its magic now!” Charlotte shrieks. “It’s going to turn to stone!” 

“How does that even work?” Brenden’s friend asks, a little suspiciously. 

“Because,” I tell him smartly, “it just does.”

“I bet your grandmother moves them,” he says, and Hannah and I politely inform him of his stupidity. We laugh all the rest of the way to the pool and I try not to think about the nights I hear Grandma going out “to water the flowers” after we’ve gone to bed. Or the Walmart trip where I saw identical replicas of the gnomes I knew so well sitting on the sale aisle shelves. They’re magic, I tell myself. Less because I actually believe it though, and more because I want to.

The next time I see Hannah her hair is still short, even though we promised each other we’d grow ours out like Rapunzel. Now she is more like Snow White, I tell her as we enter the woods behind the pool. A tribe of wet children follow us and the construction begins. Everyone has a role, and since Quinn and Emma are third graders this fall, all orders defer to them. The smaller kids are sent to gather the branches and leaves, while the rest of us scour the woods for the largest possible forms of scaffolding we can find. Twigs poke at my sun-burnt feet as we pick across the fallen leaves, dragging logs of impressive sizes with strength driven only by a communal sense of duty – and a communal fear of Quinn. When the stick fort is finished, we don’t let Charlotte inside. Hannah tells her she doesn’t know the secret password and Quinn and Emma laugh. Then the fort becomes a make-up salon. And everyone except Charlotte lines up to have their faces, nails, legs, and arms decorated in chalk-like paint. Next year it will become a sushi restaurant, serving a variety of rolls all sourced organically from the local forest leaves and sticks. Quinn and Emma will be too old to play and Charlotte will say she doesn’t want to, even when we ask.

The next summer is a rainy summer, and the stream on Church Lane floods, taking one unfortunate garden gnome with it. We search downstream as far as we can, but we never find it. Grandma says it must have gone down the mountain. I told her, perhaps testingly, that since it's magic, the gnome will come back. She smiled and said I was a very smart girl. Three days later, the gnome appeared once again among his friends, its painted coat looking surprisingly even shinier after his downstream adventure. 

Because of the storms, the pool is closed and Hannah and I go instead to our porches. The world around us spins, emerald mountains blending with the cloud-dotted sky in flashes of streaking motion as we swing back and forth on Grandpa’s hammock. Then it all disappears and only we exist, listening to the sound of our own laughter, back and forth. We suck on ice pops the color of highlighters. Hannah slurps hers dry in minutes, grinning and sticking out a fluorescent purple tongue. I take my time, letting the juice collect at the bottom because I like to save the best for last I tell her. I also don’t want the sweetness to end.

We talk about the boys at camp and she says Brenden is ugly and annoying. I laugh and say I agree even though the purple diary under my bed says otherwise. She tells me she doesn’t like boys so I say me too and we throw our popsicle wrappers over the railing, giggling. Summers later, when Hannah and I no longer spend every afternoon on each other’s porches or care about matching backpacks, I find out that it was only me who was lying.

The next time we are giggling about boys, we are sitting on Hannah’s porch, playing Monopoly. By now, I have seen my grandmother move the gnomes with my own eyes but I haven’t told Hannah. Part of me doesn’t want to believe it myself; part of me wants to hold on. Part of me doesn’t want to spoil the magic for Hannah. 

I place a second house on Park Place and pray she rolls a six. We trash talk each other, and when that gets boring we trash talk others. On the mountaintop, everyone knows everything about everyone. Like how Aiden’s brother is in trouble again and that’s why he’s “acting out”. Or how Charlotte doesn’t come to camp anymore because her dad lost his job at the garage. We see her sometimes, at the supermarket or at the burger place. She’s so awkward, we say. Hannah buys Boardwalk and tells me that her dad is leaving. I start to tell her about the gnomes, but I stop when I realize that I no longer need to. 

Hannah’s family doesn’t come up the next summer. Mom says they are staying in Ohio this year and that Hannah is sick. I should write her a letter, she says, because it’s the nice thing to do. She doesn’t say anything else so I tell her I will.

I spend that summer at the pool, on porches, in the woods and over fire pits like any other year. Except instead of Hannah by my side it's Quinn, Emma, and Ivy. Noah, Liam, and Alex. Charlotte. We ride in Alex’s jeep to the lake, spend the day on the sand and in the water, gossiping and comparing tan lines. When it starts to get dark we go to the secret clearing in the woods where little kids used to make stick forts. Emma and Ivy start a fire and we gather around the logs, our faces lit up by the orange flames, talking about life, the future, and every stupid thing we can think of. Then we take blankets from the jeep and sleep under the stars, listening to the sounds of foxes and black bears and the music from our speaker that we forgot to turn off. 

When we can’t go to the lake we go to the Bailey house, the run-down cottage in the woods at the northmost point of the park. It was owned by Pete Bailey, a 92 year old mountaintop legend, who stopped coming up from the city ten years ago when his wife died and whose house, with cracked screen doors and trees growing through the glassless windows, now served as the epicenter for local teenage life. We called it The Rippowam; I was never sure why.

We spend Fourth of July there, setting off old fireworks we found around the house and laughing when, instead of working, they almost blow off our toes. We blast music and sleep on rocks. Then morning would come and we’d drive to the gas station and eat cinnamon sugar donuts on the side of 23A in bikini tops and flip flops, talking about the stupid things we did and laughing because we knew we’d only do them again.

I forget to write Hannah’s letter that year.

I see Hannah the following July when we arrive back on the mountaintop. Her hair is cut short again, not like Snow White, but more like Eleven from Season 2 Stranger Things with a new blond streak in it. She is taller too, and thinner. I want to tell her that I’m sorry about her parents divorce and that I know her secret because my sister was “sick” this winter too. I want to talk to her but I can’t because when I see her I am sitting at the pool with Charlotte and Emma and she is walking in with her Mom and younger sister. She sees me and I give her a wave and she just smiles. Charlotte and Emma laugh at her hair so I pretend to ignore the nausea in my stomach. So I just smile too.

In the summer after 9th grade, I am a lifeguard at the pool. I watch little kids throw rings in the deep end and dive for bottle caps. They lie on the rocks on Paw Patrol towels and contour each other's faces with red rock paint. They sit in their soggy fluorescent one-pieces, and I have to remind them not to run with flippers on. From my high white chair, I think about what I will do when my shift ends. We still go to the lake and to Rippowam, but now we have vehicles besides Alex’s jeep, and our roaming grounds expand to town, and the watering hole with the big rock jump we call Fawn’s Leap. I still see Hannah, either around the pool during my shifts, or I’ll pass by her house on a morning run. We still talk when we see each other, about her school year in Ohio or the new Netflix show. There’s a lot we don’t talk about too, and sometimes, when I see her mom at the Union General buying milk and the same brand of ice pops I remember sharing with Hannah on the back porch hammock, this bothers me. But it’s too late because when Hannah’s mom sees me she smiles and gives me a hug and tells me that Hannah is going to boarding school in North Carolina and won't be spending much time here anymore. She didn’t tell you that? I shake my head and her mom nods. She doesn’t tell me the name of the boarding school and I don’t ask. Some things, I guess, we will never talk about. 

“Um, excuse me,” a little girl with stringy brown hair and pink Peppa Pig goggles still suctioned to her face approaches my chair, “my friend just saw a bee in the pool.” 

No longer distracted, I grab the long plastic net I keep under my seat for these not uncommon occasions and follow the girl to the far side of the baby pool. As I scoop the writhing insect from the chlorine vent and tell the girl that it’s a fly, not a bee, the friend politely asks if I would like a rock paint makeover, because apparently, I could really use one. I smile and say that I’m on duty and laugh when I notice the soggy polka-dot socks still dripping from her feet. After all these years, the bottom was still unpaved.