Jodi Hills

So this is who I am – a writer that paints, a painter that writes…

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BANG!

As far back as I can remember, July never promised to stay. But without fail, each year we banged it in with a welcome so loud, thinking this time, just maybe, it would. 

It was the Schulz brothers at the bottom of the gravel road that introduced us to the firecracker. They didn’t bother to wait for the fourth. By July first, they were armed and ready. Pockets filled with matches, they wandered VanDyke road to make sure its young inhabitants were awakened to the magic of summer. Feet perched bare and tentative, I watched as they pulled the firecrackers from their tattered jeans. My toes curled in as they lit the matches. I held my breath, as they put one to the other. BANG! I jumped back! BANG! BANG! It screamed the warning – summer was here! BANG! BANG! BANG! Do not miss out, they cried! The bangs got closer and louder and skipped in the gravel. And I cheered and vowed to not miss a day!

Without my knowledge or permission, July has once again raced through its month of days. I hear the bangs of the 31st at my heels, and know I can’t let this moment pass, not one moment, without a celebration.

Sleeveless I sit beside the open window and still believe my summer will never end. I can feel it in my heart! Bang! – it beats against my suntanned chest! Bang! Bang! I do believe! BANG! BANG! — I shout the Schulz warning, uncurl my toes, and skip in the gravel of my endless day!

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The summer I didn’t go to California.

Entering the second grade they began the year with an assignment — What did you do on your summer vacation? Now, to be honest, I wasn’t ashamed of my summer schedule. I loved it. I would get up early. Fill the the styrofoam covered thermos — the one that my brother made in shop class and discarded in the basement — with ice water, and off I ran into the sun. I ran even faster than the hand painted stripes on the school made thermos. Some laughed when I continued the report. Of how I ran through Hugo’s wheat field. Rode my banana seat bike through the cemetery. Climbed Big Ole’s foot. Spent my weekly quarter for vacuuming and cleaning the house mirrors on a frozen Milky Way bar from Rexall Drug. Softball games. The endless swim of Lake Latoka. I heard one girl whisper loudly behind a cupped hand to her neighbor, all the while keeping eye contact with me as I returned to my desk, “She didn’t even go on vacation.”

I held my smiling face through perched elbows as she spoke about her trip to California. It sounded nice, I thought, but what I was thinking of was how after 4pm, when my mom came home from work, she would vacation out of her pretty summer work dress into shorts and a t-shirt and we would get on our bikes. It was gravel on Van Dyke Road, but traffic was non existent and you could ride down the center of the road. We stretched out our arms and rode hand in hand as the dust kicked up behind us.

I’m still smiling. I’ve been to California and beyond. Well beyond. But my heart vacations daily, floating just above the gravel.

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After the pétanque.

I can’t go back to when they played there, these sun-kissed French boys just out of ear-shot of their grandmother, (intentionally or unintentionally). Back to when they played with sticks and sometimes fists, like only brothers and cousins can. They wrestled below and within the smells of tobacco and cut grass and stove pots wafting through open shutters.

But when we gather each year on August 15th, Napoleon’s birthday, (and one young cousin Guillaume’s), if the wind is just right, and the wine has settled, the vine that hangs above and beside the old house whispers to me, “Listen…listen to them play.” And I hear the clinking of the Pétanque balls, and the spirited calls of who is closer, with arms pointing to the ground, pleading cases, just this side of youth’s wrestle. And these now men, very grown men, are still pinkened by the sun, and the thrill of a summer that just might not end. 

And for the moment, I belong. Because the language of family is universal. And laughter and hope and joy under summer’s whisper, after the pétanque, rings loud and clear, and needs no translation. 

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