Blue and Green

I'm home enjoying a quiet, sunny summer day. It's nice to just sit on my back patio and stare at the trees when I'm alone. I don't fantasize about food or sex so much anymore. I dream of being old, like my Grandma, and sitting on a back porch by a lake, like she does, and having nothing better to do than stare off into the distance.               

I awoke at eight thirty, my t-shirt twisted and my legs bent and awkwardly stretched this way and that. Pillows were everywhere but under my head. I drew up the blinds and just marveled at the day. Blue and green. I knew this day would be special, and I thanked God for it right away. I've enjoyed silence and stillness all morning. The air smells salty, the ocean just a ten-minute drive away. I can't spot a cloud in the sky. It's a blue and green day as I sit at a glass patio table, glancing over my condo development's well-groomed back lawn, and what Bob Ross calls, "happy little trees." Quiet, nature-inspired days like this remind me of my Grandma's house.      

I remember being five years old, when Grandpa was still very much alive, and when his guitar and bluegrass music filled the green living room. I remember his foot stomping, and the smoke from his cigar moving up into the room and floating like stretched strands of cotton over our heads. The half-drawn blinds scattered light on the smoke and made the dust sparkle.                  

The television aired a muted football game. Grandma's fingers dangled over the rim of her chair's arm rest as she tapped the air and quietly sang non-words or words I couldn't understand. She would swing her short legs and tiny feet to the music and eventually return to some knitting project buried in her leather ottoman footstool.                                     

Summer days spent at Grandma's had a sense of stillness. The hours of the day stretched out into an eternity. The backyard enchanted me. There was this really cool tree, actually three trees growing out of one stump. It was large and green and dreamy. I poked the sap bubbles with sticks and collected bugs to trap in the sap blobs. One day Grandpa came out with a box of toothpicks and twisted one into a bump. Then to my horror, he ate the sap. He gave me a toothpick and I gave it a try. It wasn’t much better than the sip of beer he gave me once before, and I made an awful face. Grandpa laughed. Then he retrieved a fishing pole and a bucket from under the back porch, put a bobber on my line, then organized trash into various barrels and retreated indoors, leaving me to my own vices and imagination.

I dug worms under the woodpile, fished from the lake, and picked blueberries that grew along the fence between Grandma's house and the next door Boat Marina. Grandma and Grandpa had a really cool camping trailer parked in the backyard too, and I would ask them to unlock it for me when I played outside. I always went straight to the candy jar and sucked on a piece of butterscotch or cinnamon hard candy while playing with Barrel of Monkeys and Wordsearch books. Later I would go back outside and lay on the dock spread out like a snow angel in the summer heat. Squinting, I could watch the dreamy tree's leaves delicately waver back and forth, high up against the backdrop of barely passing clouds.

I probably slept on that dock, too. Nobody checked on me for what felt like hours. I was uninhabited and carefree, with dirt under my fingernails and grass stains on my knees. I could close my eyes and listen to the Marina's boats rock back and forth in their places. There was the occasional creak of a lone bullfrog, the fluttering of a duck's wings against the water as it took flight, and the distant lull of human activity far, far away. Everything seemed far away then.          

Far away... like the memory of it now. Every summer I lost a few lines of bait and tackle to the community of lily pads and cattails that lay just over the end of Grandma's dock. Even when I cast out to the left or right of the weeds, the current would sometimes move my line back into the path of them. I could only reel so close when this happened. The line would get stuck and I would lie on my belly and try everything to loosen the hook. I would reach and pull the line vertically, then find a long stick and poke under the water at where the hook might be. I'd pull this way and that, gently, then yank as hard as I could, to no avail. 

Writing about memory is kind of like casting out a fishing line. Some memories get stuck in the weeds that grow between then and now.  Others come back easily. My heart aches as I get to the end of this memory and say, that's it, I can't remember too much more. I remember just enough to wish I could go back and spend another day, an eternity, playing in Grandma's backyard.  

I wish I could go back and have the chance to be five years old again. I'd even settle for being reincarnated into a time traveling black fly. I'd fly back to the summer of 1986 and buzz around on Grandma's back porch, and watch myself from a distance.