Allen wheeled his big sprayer truck in the dirt lane and
parked below the house. Climbing out of
his truck, he paused and watched us, amused.
“What are you girls doing?” my brother asked.
Gasping for air, we told him we were “saving people” – that
there was a big flood and we were the only ones who could swim and bring people
safely out of their high-rise apartments. I suppose we thought he’d be
intrigued, for most times when folks asked us what we were playing, they seemed
to enjoy our imagination.
Not Allen. He shook
his head and said, “Don’t you know that children who play like this go crazy
when they are older?”
Allen grabbed his dusty lunch bucket from the truck, strode
to the cellar door, and went inside. Rachel
and I looked at each other. We just shook out heads and “swam” back out the
lane to rescue more people.
The east side of the lane was lined with trees from what we
called the Bender woods, because they belonged to Bill Bender. He was some
distant relative and didn’t mind if we traipsed through his woods, we thought. Or, maybe he just didn't know we traipsed through this woods! This time,
though, we merely used the lane and pretended that the tall trees were
high-rise apartments or houses in some town of our imagination. Folks were
stranded in their apartments because of flooding, and it was up to us to rescue
them!
For some reason, our play was more fun when we had more
obstacles to cross. For some reason, we deliberately planned our play so that
we became heroes of the day. That’s why
the boats we used had no motors. How
else would we need to swim to rescue people if the boats had motors?!) The
boats were strapped to our waists and we swam to the apartments and waited for
people to come get into our boats, calling encouraging words to them as they
stepped into our boats. Then we “swam” back across the waters to safety. Once
there, we unloaded our passengers and swam back to rescue more.
It’s funny now when I think back on the fact that neither of
us were good swimmers. Our only experience was in the Casselman River that
shared frogs and tadpoles, and sometimes snakes - among the rocks. The river’s
water barely reached out shoulders after a rain. Yet here we were, moving our
arms in strong breast strokes to bring people to safety. I wonder how many
times we swam in and out the lane and how many lives we saved in our play.
After our play, it’s no wonder we were tired and didn’t
complain when bedtime came. That night, I thought about Allen’s warning after I
snuggled in bed. So what, I told
myself as I drifted off to sleep, I
don’t care if I do get crazy when I am older. I’m having too much fun to worry
about that now. And if I do go crazy, I won’t be able to know it – and I
wouldn’t have missed the fun playing, either.
Now, Allen is gone, and with him his teasing. We disliked it then, and we miss it now. Deep down, I knew Allen was a master at jokes and figured if he was really that concerned, he wouldn’t have smiled like he did. For certain, the amusement in his eyes would have been absent as he stood there with his lunch bucket, watching his sisters play.
We are older now, and we’re still sane. We can no longer
“swim” in and out the dirt lane. Rachel
and I still manage to do things together. Only this time, instead of saving
pretend lives, we help each other. I was
with her for her double mastectomy five years ago, and she came to help me
after mine.
Instead of swimming out the dirt lane at our homeplace,
we travel miles to work and play,
together. We're slower, and arthritis shows in the way we move and groove.
Our homeplace has changed and so have we. Yet the memories
of laughter and play are some of the most cherished ones we have today.
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