Joy and catharsis

I remember growing up in Georgia with the smell of sweet sticky pine and honeysuckle in the summer time. Running barefoot as fast as I could down the steep hill of a drive way in the warm summer rain, just to splash into the puddle at the end of the drive. There was a huge rock at the end of my street that we would all climb on and pretend that we were adventurers. Behind my house there was nothing but wooded forest area with a creek and small pond about half a mile back. We would hike back there with daddy once a week just to see the flowers and smell the rushing water flowing down the rocky green mossy creek. I had a tree house, although it wasn’t in a tree, that we would play on and swing from the chain linked swing that hung, what seemed like miles, above the ground. I would run down my one way street of a neighborhood to meet up with my best friend just so we could climb the dogwood trees that grew in a row on the side of her house. Once we brought up sheets of cardboard and old towels that mom never used and made a kind of fort up there. She always took the best branches to sit on once we got to the top, and I always hated her for it. I remember swimming in Mr. Joe’s pool on the hottest days of the summer when you couldn’t go outside for 5 min and not get sun burnt. The pasta salad, grilled steak, French fries, and corn on the cob are still on my tongue.

We would swim for hours in that pool all day and late  into the night. When we would get out our fingers and toes would be so wrinkly and shriveled up that we looked like old people. I remember being so tired those nights that my sister and i had to be carried home and put into bed. Every Sunday my daddy would get up extra early just to make blueberry muffins for us. The warm, sweet smell of the muffins filled the morning air with happiness. Biting into one of them even today takes me back to when I was younger.