These days

These halcyon days

Can they please be forever?

Streetlights coming on at dusk at the end of a long, warm June day - the longest of the year.

Can’t it always be just like this?

It’s summer vacation. School ended last week with Field Day:

Softball and bomb pops and hot dogs, all our friends around us.

Next year is Middle School and we’re afraid.

We heard the stories.

It’s harder and meaner and everything changes.

These long happy days - “just for babies”, they say - will be lost.

It will take everything we have to find our place. The entire year.

And then Mom & Dad will move again and we’ll have to start all over

Friendless and struggling.

But now,

Now, it’s summer! The highest holiest days of the season.

We’ll ride our bikes all day. Everywhere.

Cross the Anthony Wayne Trail.

Make multi-color lanyards at Day Camp.

Stay two whole weeks at Grandpa’s hotel on the Lake.

Gather bouquets of dandelions and chase butterflies

And wear safari shorts with all the secret zippers and pockets.

Sleep in baseball summer short pajamas.

Play freeze tag in the street.

Slip inside the big kid’s gym and sneak on the stage.

Wade through the tall grass in the vacant lot past the dead end sign pretending to be tigers.

Even though we really need to pee, we’ll hold it

Because the streetlights have finally come on and if we dash home,

Mom won’t let us out again.

We’ll wait, instead, until we hear her call -

Her voice a lilting soprano sing-song

Rising and falling to the syllables that make up our name.

Years later, now - when we’re old -

How we’ll wish we could hear her sweet refrain just one more time. But tonight we’re still just Kids who don’t want the day to end.

Can’t it please always be like this?

Sad and grown and missing almost everything we can’t yet know that, yes.

Yes, it can always be just like this. Just like we remember.

It will be. It is.

We only have to arrive.

The lights are coming on.

Mom’s calling our name.

We’re running home.