Rainy Sundays

Isn't that the best picture in the world? Absent teeth and real smiles make the perfect picture.

My sickness is gone for the most part except for a little bit of my cough. I didn't give it to anyone either, so I guess something's to be said about quarantining yourself. What a lazy Sunday night, it makes me want to share a memories...

I remember being five: carefree, with my hair untamed, complete with a mixture of curls and waves that I wished would take the form of my neighbors hair. Mine was thick and always seemed to be big and diva-like, but I wanted it to be like my neighbor, Sarah's-long and limp. I wasn't allowed to wear it like her in a braid down my back every day though, because my mom didn't want it to look like I had a "piece of rope for hair.". No matter, hair was minimal to me.

Summers were so wonderful to me because they were filled with no worries and endless frolics. When I was 6 or so, my friend Michaela and I would ride around our neighborhood on our bikes as fast as we could, convinced there was an imaginary idian chief behind us and he was mad. My arms always smelled like sunscreen, my shirts never totally covered my tummy, and my feet were always brown from the sun. There's a pond by my house that I spent most of my days at. I'd swim in it, not knowing WHAT exactly I was swimming IN, and had "hidden" trails around it that every other kid in the neighborhood knew about. Though everyone knew, it was mostly me and Michaela there every day with our bags of ramen. We didn't ever cook it, instead, we'd climb up into the trees surrounding the old folks home and eat the noodle bricks raw and have contests to see who could finish eating the seasoning without being grossed out.

We were strange children, but my sisters and I combined were even stranger. So many times if you had driven our culdasack you would have seen 3 little girls: 1 up on the porch reading something and drinking coke, the other older one on the ground giving instructions and getting excited, and then the youngest girl attempting cartwheels, but achieving nothing...(All this, might I add with some of our dad's music coming from the house, usually Eagles in this era.) We'd sit in the backyard(or the front, wherever the others were) and I remember eating fried chicken and potato salad on a big panda blanket with my sisters yelling songs and doing the things we knew annoyed each other as well as jumping over bushes and overgrown grass.

As time went on we all grew up and started developing traits we all still have to this day. My oldest sister, Ashleigh, and her best friend Dana were always a comforting sight to see when you'd drive up to our house. So many summer days there they'd be, listening to Simon & Garfunkel sippin' coke in their sundresses...They do this now, but at Ashleigh's house, not ours. Tara'd be with her friends down town buying sidewalk chalk and would then come home with Caroline Jones and colour our ENTIRE culdasak in one afternoon. She's still down town the most of any of us, but working instead of buying chalk. This is what we did, and I love that it was this way and never filled with drama or sadness for too long. Though my days are not as carefree or soft, they are still beautiful, and every summer, though now I work most days, I still sit out on my porch at dusk, lookin' at the hills that surround us, and soak it all up.