THAT SUMMER

In the decade before I was born, everyone was a Betty or a Beverly, or a Mary Lou, and their hair was flipped up and the skirts were poodles.

But when I was young, it was Sunday and it was Easter, and it was the ‘60s, and I wore a new dress that my my mother had hemmed the night before. Made of Polyester, a fabric that couldn’t and wouldn’t wrinkle no matter if the dog laid on it for a year. Not that she did. (The dog.) Or would. There were Easter egg hunts with egg shells that cracked and crumbled like windshield glass and the blue dye had seeped into the slimy egg white but the yolk was still good – if you liked yolk.

Soon, it was later and we are now well past the bell-bottoms and the senior pictures and college and marriage and I guess we’re all grown up now, but I’ve never let loose of those summer mornings of warm blue sky, and shorts, and Keds, of bikes and friends, their hair glowing like halos in the late June sun. We had cookies on the porch and then we dared each other to jump from a high tree branch onto the thick unmown grass near the tennis court. There were Sunday afternoons that lasted well into dark, after the sun went down at 9 p.m., when fireflies sprang into action like shooting stars – and everyone in the small dirt-street town stayed up well after midnight that summer.  

~ by Cheryl Unruh