Memories of a Larvae Date Tuesday, April 23, 2024 - 06:16 AM PST Topic Experiences Imagine to yourself 18 years ago...a little girl, wedged into the slanted back window of a 1984 I-ROC cherry red corvette...black bucket seats...roaring engine. She lies there, the T-top open to the summer sun and wind....she's eating a popsicle...she's waving at cops, truck drivers blow their horns at the sight of the little blonde girl with her finger up her nose and melted popsicle on her face. She's enjoying the ride immensely...her sisters confined to the bucket seats in the back, older, bigger, won't fit in the window like she can. A youngish man with a bald spot and a beard is driving...fast, but not breakneck, or dangrously. Everyone is enjoying the ride in the waning afternoon under a bloody orange sunset sky. They arrive home, and mom being at work, and having hillbilly neighbors with no respect for the fireworks laws, and dad sets up a rickety aluminum ladder and ushers the girls to the rooftop to watch the illegal shells burst in the mosquito sky in purples, pinks greens and whites. Occasionally the precarious perch is rattled by the boom of whole dynamite sticks and M-80's and cherry bombs(before such wonders as M-100's and M-1000's..hence the dynamite) They get sparklers. Dad sets them up with garbage can lids and wrapped in blankets in lawn chairs. He sets off jumping jacks, ground flowers, and roman candles to which six eyes gleam in excitement. A modest pyrotechnic display. More sparklers, the youngest holding it at arms length and running away from it, terrified of it, but not realizing that if she would only let go, the brightly fizzing beast that chased her every move would cease pursuit. Fuel extinguished, it goes out, and all is well as order is restored in the night once again. They head in around midnight...but the youngest always troubled by nightmares and the cookie monster on her bedroom shelf that rolls it's eyes at her in the dark, she waits for mom till 3am. Mom is watching the news. Mom is drinking tea...sweet like grandma drinks it, in her bathrobe in the living room. The youngest of three, terrified of the menace cookie monster, the incredible hulk in her closet, and the devil under her bed, creeps out. Mom puts her on her lap, and lets her drink the last of the cooling tea from her cup. She puts her to bed, careful of the hall light that will render the cookie monster still, the incredible hulk in hiding, and the devil back to the pit under her bed to wait yet another night for his prey. She sleeps under a rainbow bright quilt her grandma made her when she was three. She sleeps. The fourth of july passes. Mom still doesn't know about the roof. Mom still doesn't know about the jumpingjack that scorched her eldest daughter's sock in spite of the tin garbage can lid. Mom doesn't need to know....she'll find out all of the antics years later from the mouths of her grown daughters at thanksgiving dinners, where one insists on denying decorated carcass, and insists that no, the mashed potatoes arent' safe. She'll laugh...she'll be mortified, but her daughters are safe, they're grown, and she'll be a grandmother soon, and the oldest and youngest shall be aunts. Life goes on....and sometimes, as I think back to that one day on the fourth of july that sticks out in my head as one of the best days in my life, it goes entirely, unfairly too fast. You all have a memory or two. Some have forgotten them, like I have...and when they come to you they will seem so far away. Unreachable. Absurd...absurd that you were once a little girl picking her nose in the back window of a hotrod eating popsicles. Or the picture of that little girl in the pink shirt and blonde ringletts that just finnished a home made mud pie, remenants still evident on cheeks and in the teeth of a wide, blissfully ignorant childish smile, was you. Or was me for that matter. Makes you think...or at least it makes me do so. This article comes from Shmeng http://www.shmeng.com/ The URL for this story is: http://www.shmeng.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=332