Summer again
Once the letter was mailed, we waited in a state of anticipation. Susan, the youngest of us, sat in the front yard the day we licked the envelop and found a stamp in the utensil drawer. She wanted to extend the rusted metal flag herself, but couldn’t reach the top of the mailbox, not even on her very tip toes. She blamed it on the ditch the area around the mailbox had become - so much rain and the dog’s constant digging created a permanent indentation, it was true. But Susan would never grow to be an Amazon. We always remembered her in her pygmy state - a halo of blonde curls, a bustle of yellow bloomers, that was our Susan.
She waited, butt firmly planted in the dirt, for the mail lady to pull up in her wood-paneled station wagon. Susan ran up to her, holding the letter before her like the sacred document it was. The mail lady smiled behind her oversized aviator sunglasses. You couldn’t help but smile at Susan. Not just smile: more like a soul smile that starts in your stomach and permeates out of your eye sockets and ears and finally hits your mouth like a bit of saccharine.
We waited, but the excitement, the daring, the expectation dissipated each day. The mail lady drove by with nothing but Spiegel catalogs and credit card bills. We became preoccupied with hikes into the woods, catching tadpools and water skippers in the creek, crushing coins on the railroad tracks. By the time we found a box of Chinese fireworks in a closet and set them off by the cliffs, we had all but forgotten our one-sided correspondence.
But not Susan. Susan remained faithful to our first rhythm of the summer: the rhythm of waiting.
AB
