A quote: “By all these lovely tokens September days are here, With summer’s best of weather And autumn’s best of cheer.” ~~ Helen Hunt Jackson
I’ll start with a story …
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There was magic in that last bit of summer when Grace was 14.
One hot afternoon, Grace found herself, along with Jessie and Becky, sneaking up through brush, trash trees and wild berry bushes to spy on the boys at the river.
Jessie and Becky had their mouths covered, tears of laughter rolling down their faces. Grace was shocked. No, not at the nakedness of the boys swimming at Bramble Cove. She had brothers, after all.
No, it was realizing that these boys weren’t so much boy anymore. And the one who caught her attention was old Carrot-top Billy. Who was this youth with the defined muscles and dark, auburn hair? How’d this happen?
When school started, she made it her mission to find out. Billy never stood a chance.
The years rolled by for them. Happy. Sad. Life has a way of happening when you’re making plans. Children, grandchildren.
It’s that last bit of summer again. Grace looks up at Billy still seeing auburn where it is all silver now. He looks down at her, seeing her bright laughing eyes of youth even with laugh lines.
The river is clear and cool and Bramble cove is much like it was. They move into the water, a gasp then laughing, turning to embrace.
Magic.
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Now, it’s your turn.
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. featured image cropped Adobe Stock standard license
Cameron says: The boy was sitting at the edge of the riverbank and looking wistfully at the tire swing.
“Hey there,” I said. “You all right out here?”
“I guess,” he muttered.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s just…we moved out here and I can’t do anything. I’m not allowed to go swimming, I can’t play with the others. And it’s because ‘I’ll get sick’.”
“So what would you do if you had the chance?” I grinned as I followed his eyes. “You want to swing on that, don’t you?”
The boy nodded. “Well, come on then. Last one there is a rotten egg.” Spurred on by that challenge, he raced me to the swing. He got there first so I told him he could go.
He swung out far and let go with a whoop of joy. The moment he hit the water, he was surrounded by light and he faded away.
I paid a visit to the boy’s parents. The mom looked sad as I told her what happened. “I couldn’t let him do that,” she said. “He must have hated me.”
“No, ma’am,” I replied. “There was no anger in him. He just wanted to swing one time. He’s moved on now.”
We’re really starting to settle in, enough that people are starting to explore the uncultivated lands beyond the town. Like the waterfall feeding the river that runs just south of the town limits. The Kitties put in a pipeline that takes oil down to the big processing plant by the spaceport.
Don’t ask me how somebody managed to hang a tire swing from it. For starters, I can’t imagine how anybody managed to get an old tire on one of the shuttles that took us up to the Kitties’ spaceships. They may have tech advanced way beyond ours, but they still have to account for every gram of mass. And while the Kitties have been surprisingly generous with their 3D printers, I rather doubt they’d be eager to let someone print up a tire just so it could be hung as a swing. After all, there is a war going on.
But it’s pretty clear that tire swing is getting some use. Every time I go down there, I see a lot of footprints on the riverbank, right where you’d jump to get in that swing. And not all of them are human.
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