It’s summer and the living is easy. Maybe. What about when you were a kid? I remember all kinds of neighborhood kids pouring into our family tent, sleeping bag to sleeping bag. And catching fireflies. And telling ghost stories. Some of them scared the crap out of me – the kids, not just the stories. But they’re great memories (I’m sure that time and trauma have taken care of the bad ones), and they’re mine. Sort of. They also belong to my brothers and to Nancy and her brothers and sisters and to Elaine and… I wonder, do they ever think of those days and nights?
“We are more different now than we were as kids, but that’s the way old friends work, I think… Your lives can branch off in completely different directions, but always you share that knot of past-heartbreaks and sleepovers and screened-in porches and the raw, peculiar memory of yourself which, in part, belongs to them.”
- from Getting Over Jack Wagner by Elise Juska
Write about something you remember happening during the summers of your childhood. Be specific. Did you catch fireflies or did you sneak your grandmother’s Virginia Slims? On that family vacation, did you spend the night at a Holiday Inn with a pool (!!!) or did your father insist on the family napping in the car at an Indiana rest area – the better to save time and money on the way to Wisconsin (from Connecticut)? PS: Your memory can be real or not; only you’ll know for sure.