By: Zoe Howard

Agnes Scott College, Georgia USA

When we were growing up, we dug and filled a pond in the woods behind our house. In the summertime, after lunch on those hot Southern days, we pulled on our bathing suits and ran barefoot through clumps of poison ivy, moss, ferns, touch-me-nots, before throwing ourselves from the dry bank into the brown water. If we were quiet and still, we could watch shiny black water beetles scuttling across the water, stitching it together with their bodies. We moved again, splashing water up towards the sky to see how its droplets snatched fragments of afternoon sunlight. When our fingers and toes were soft, pruney from hours of play, we climbed out of the water and up to the house, letting the breeze dry our wet bodies. Changing out of our bathing suits and into our play clothes, we leapt off the back porch into a cargo net that our grandparents suspended between the house and two trees. We pretended that we were jumping out of airplanes until it got dark outside—when the lightning bugs came out, and the frogs started to hum, and Mama gave us glass jars so we could catch lightning bugs until our sweaty palms smelled sweet like their secretion. Then we went inside to eat dinner, and after that we sat on the back porch rocking back and forth in our chairs with a lamp shining from a nearby table. It was there that we breathed in the sweet scent of pine trees and flowers and grass, all mixed up with the smell of a crisp Appalachian chill. Mama and Daddy played bluegrass and folk songs on their guitar and mandolin, and we sang songs about Darcy Farrow, and picking apples, and coats of many colors. I miss those days. I miss the pond and the house and the music. Sometimes I forget that I’m grown up, that the pond dried up years ago, that my family sold the house. I think that I can go back there, to those long summer days when we were growing up. But then I remember. I have nothing but memories to take me home.