That One Summer Night (that was forever once)

It wasn't hot for once. Ohio remains hot every summer but the night seems to be like cold water poured over a fire pit:

the heat lightens up but the smoke of it hangs in the air, the remnants of what it was before.

Smoke, in this case, is humidity. Cool but the air remains a heavy blanket.

"It's the humidity that'll get you” – A sentence familiar to every child raised with cornfields, highways, Amish country stores, and M's crossed out across their hometown signs once a year.

We're outside, fireflies dancing across our eyes as we hunt in the grass. Poised in the clumsy, childlike fashion of untrained net-like hands that reach and reach and reach.

We don't have a dog yet, I don't think, if we did we'd be more careful where we stepped. But we don't so we run through our yard and jump after each bug we see, the grass catching us but just barely before we’re gone again. A moment in our palms as we grasp them tight, a little wish with each one we let free.

We never keep them. We don't have jars. We don't want to either, I don't think. I know we didn't ever try.

The night is cool. It's made cooler, lighter, by the running and the screaming. We don't scream as loud at night, but we still run. Running never gets boring when you're not double digits yet.

There's a fire somewhere, we can smell it. A good fire, meant to be lit. The crackle evades our ears but the memory of it whispers in the back of our heads. This is before I know that fire can be bad. 

It's a welcoming smell. 

Smoke and wood and marshmallows and the familiar scent of a guitar's strings being plucked and plucked and strum. Sweet, sickly chemicals too.

My father, younger than he is now, his hair blonder and less grey, the one holding the guitar. We don't have a fire pit yet so he sits on our stoop and plays Landslide by Fleetwood Mac.

I don't remember the beginning or the end, just his smooth, high-low voice that reminds me of baking bread, cozy nights when the rain beats hard on the roof, and burrowing into my parents' bed in the early morning. Campfire smoke comes up too.

I only remember him singing the middle "cause I built my life around you"

Stevie Nicks was right --even if her voice never sounds the same as my father's does, never sounds as perfect-- time makes you bolder and children do get older. I didn't know it that summer, not at all.

But I had built my life around my father, and the night bugs that glowed and the soft summer grass, and running with my sister and the neighbor kids as the heat backed off, leaving only his blanket of humidity behind.

"It's the humidity that'll get you." That's true, I suppose. It'll get you and drag you back to that summer, all those years ago,

when you were just a child running through your backyard, hands outstretched for a firefly, with your whole life’s singing voice wafting over you.