Kyle City Limits
by BRENDA STEWART
As an adult, I am always amazed when I catch the scent or taste or sound of something random and it staggers me backwards to some long forgotten time in my childhood. I guess back then, we were closer to the ground, smack dab in the middle of the action and taking it all in.
Our summer world smelled of Coppertone and Benzocane and Off. It tasted like charcoal and ketchup and Pixie Stix. We licked our thumbs and savored the sweet powdery crunch of Tang and Kool-Aid and Nilla Puddin’ out of short wax sacks in cardboard boxes until we got stabbing pains in our sides and our lips puckered. We cracked a million sunflower seeds, artfully arcing the black shells into a pile just to get at the tiny salty prize inside.
We snuck orange baby aspirin and Flintstone vitamins for candy and each and every one of us got stung by the licked thumb snuck into the Hershey cocoa powder bitterness in the kitchen cabinet. That just didn’t make sense. Chocolate should not make a child recoil in vapid dryness. In oddly misplaced revenge, we always enticed the younger neighbor kids to our secret stash so that they could sneak their first taste as we hovered in wicked glee.
I had a metal AWAKE Orange Juice can full of “trinkets”, miniature dice and babies and hot dogs and clothespins and we used to sit outside our front doors and trade trinkets until the sun went down and the porch lights came on and signaled us that it was time for dinner, bath and bed. Before daylight savings time was inflicted on our clocks, there was no question about your curfew or when your day was over. You could tell. It was dark outside.
The last day of school meant that we could finally retire all our closed-toe shoes and begin to break in the colorful sandals we’d been saving right next to our new two-piece bathing suits. Spared from the trash heap were those ratty tennies that we had blown out on the dirt playgrounds and ball fields the previous year. Too gross for public, we’d lace those babies up to shield our feet from the rocky beds of skin-numbingly cold rivers and cactus strewn hiking-paths-to-nowhere in state parks all over Texas.
At the end of those long days, our shriveled toes looked like new piglets and our hair was always so tangled that when they finally fought the snarls out, just before they snatched you bald, they french braided your long hair so tight that your eyes went oriental and you didn’t have to mess with it for a solid week. The only upside to the torture: when you did finally slip the thin bands off the ends of those braids, you had an enviable white-girl fro for the rest of the day. By August, we had calluses between our toes, the soles of our feet were tough as old yard gloves, and we were brown as coconuts. Back then, sunburns were a summer rite of passage. Although we slathered on the Coppertone religiously at breakfast, by mid-afternoon thin white t-shirts were pulled over our scarlet-seared shoulders before we were sent back out to frolic.
As the sun sank and the night became chilly, we peeled our soggy suits off our limp bodies to slip into the warmth of our long pjs. The cold aerosol of Benzocane blasted our scorched skin as we shrieked and writhed away from tsking parents saying “Boy, these guys are gonna sleep like babies tonight...” And that we did, listening to the crickets singing their summer lullabyes.
