The girls we used to be

Sandy and I stood shoeless in long dress-up clothes in front of the new yellow playhouse built by Grandpa Lang.  It couldn’t get any better than this.

The inside of the playhouse was unfinished.  Someday Grandpa would get around to it, just like someday he’d put build the canopy on the wishing well he’d cemented into the front yard while we were on vacation.  What a surprise for Mom.  (She’d never complained about this ugly cylinder of rock and concrete in the middle of the yard, but I saw her smile when somehow Dad moved it to the side of house, hidden by the giant white camillia plant when it bloomed.)  Inside the playhouse, a wooden table stood, topped with blue plastic plates and a yellow teapot of water, and two tiny chairs.

As we sat and chatted the other evening, with an urge to be shoeless again, we reminisced.  She recalled the scary home invasion, oh so many years ago, on Halloween.  As Mom and Dad, dressed in Mom’s handsewn striped convict outfits, complete with Dad’s touch of ball and chain, pushed their way in to Sandy’s home uninvited, Sandy recalls it took a few minutes before realizing it was her fun-loving uncle.  The ball was a volleyball painted black, and the chain was real.  Long and heavy, as I see it in the memories forged in my mind.  Dad didn’t let it go to waste after Halloween.  The chain ended up in the giant box he used to wrap his special gift, a new Singer sewing machine for Mom that Christmas.  The box probably ten times the size of the sewing machine, purchased before Thanksgiving, was filled with anything Dad found to make the box more ominous and heavy, including the ol’ ball and chain.  The wrapped gift never made it to Christmas.  Dad couldn’t wait to surprise Mom, and she opened it on Thanksgiving.

We chatted about piano sing-alongs, dolls, and the old swimming pool.  “Cousin Larry said that’s where he learned to swim,” Sandy recalled.  “Said your dad threw him in the water and said, ‘Start kicking.’  And he did.”

“Yep, that would be Dad,” I laughed.  He didn’t believe in pampering.  I remember him saying he’d rather have us with a few broken bones, than to experience life vicariously.  And I suppose we did — the broken bones, that is.  We had dived off the fence back by the pool into the deep end.  I remember diving off the roof of the back house just over the property line.  Only I kinda missed — my legs scraped the tiles on the pool’s edge as I entered the water.

Sandy and I laughed.  How we ever survived days of riding in an old open Jeep in the Los Angeles riverbed, dune buggy riding in a desolate area owned by Southern California Edison between electrical poles, trampolines, the giant swings in Sandy’s backyard where we went so high we almost looped the swing set, we’ll never know.  We’d survived a lot harder of things as adults.

I’d like to think that the carefree girls we were on that day standing in front of the new playhouse shaped the women we are today.

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