My Summer Nights Outdoors in Massachusetts, 1953: A Lyric Essay
1. Our tent
Grey canvas on its wooden platform smelled musty, never drying out between summer rains and humidity. Helen, a teenager in the neighborhood, let us use it when she was out of town. Carol, my neighbor friend, and I loved this tent— like a secret hideaway for one night. The tent lived all summer in a field of bright yellow buttercups—held under chins predicted liking for butter—and daisies, nodding white heads—he loves me, he loves me not. Tall grasses were soft on our legs as we gathered a bright bouquet for a jar of water on an old, splintering picnic table nearby.
We were the rulers of our kingdom of black and yellow swallowtail butterflies dancing nearby and robins bracing their feet to pull reluctant worms from the meadow soil.
Peanut butter and strawberry jam sandwiches stuck to the roofs of our mouths as we washed them down with home-made root beer. Molasses cookies, Carol’s mom baked, were still fragrant from the oven.
“I hope Helen is gone a lot this summer,” Carol said as she bit into her cookie. “It’s groovy to be here by ourselves, no grown-ups telling us what to do.”
“I love it here too,” I said, “The sunset is just starting. See the orange and pink? Reminds me of that rainbow sherbet we had the other day.” I couldn’t tell Carol that I wished this place was our home, just for her and me, away from the tangle that was my real life. He threatened me and my family so I could never tell anyone.
Legs dangling over the picnic table bench, we talked of school coming in the fall, the teachers we wanted, those we feared, the boys who were cute, the weirdos, the ways we could get out of badminton that we were forced to play in gym class.
As darkness seeped into the sky, and the first stars winked, we curled under blankets on the cots in the tent. With flashlights we made creepy monster shapes on the canvas walls and ceiling, told menacing stories of bears chasing us in the woods, and of threatening Indians stalking us with tomahawks ready to scalp us like in the westerns on TV.
An owl hooted while crickets’ din filled the cool air. Helen’s cat, prowling the night, slipped in, as usual, under the tent flap and made a bed for herself kneading my blanket at the foot of my cot, then curling into a furry ball. Her whispered purring dissipated anxiety about my real home as we fell asleep in comfort and security away from adults, away from my father’s continual and incomprehensible wrath.
2. Our gravestones
The night heat was heavy, damp, and merciless. Our bed sheets were wet with sweat, and the fan Carol’s mom had set up only stirred the hot, humid air. It shouldn’t be this hot in early June.
“I can’t sleep,” I whispered to Carol who had invited me to spend the night at her house.
“Neither can I,” she murmured.
“Let’s go,” I said.
We tiptoed through the screen door, bare feet scampering across the wooden porch, then scurrying on the edge of the street to the corner where fireflies hovered by the rusted cemetery gate that was never locked. We knew exactly where the marble slabs lay flat in the ground. Two were longer than the others, and we could lie side by side under oak and maple trees that had shaded the marble during the day. We spread our arms out on the slabs to make every bit of our skin available to the cool marble, We said that we were angels, the dead below us had conjured.
We imagined the lives of the dead beneath us. Had they fought in wars, died of smallpox, or been killed in a saloon fight? Each time we came we made up new stories about the bones below us, their names and dates faded from their stones. Our voices muffled in the heavy night air, we whispered about our break from rules, about parents who were clueless to our whereabouts, and about our link with souls of the dead.
The moon glimmered between the rustling leaves above us, and fog crept in from the pond nearby inspiring our ghost stories. We imagined the dead beneath us listening to our stories. We thought we could feel their breath as a soft breeze wafted by. We knew no one came to visit these old graves and felt these spirits appreciated our attention.
Fireflies glowed and blinked matching the moon sparkling between the leaves. We fell asleep in the heavy scent of lilacs by the cemetery fence and to the soft calls of whip-poor-wills.
3. Our Hayfield
The scent of dried clover and alfalfa filled the air as we scuffed through the windrows of drying hay. In the middle of the field, far from our homes, Carol and I piled up a colossal hay mound and covered it with quilts we dragged from our bedrooms too hot for sleep in August. The parched hay prickled our legs, but knowing how cool our night would be, made it okay.
Carol brought a jar of milk and a bag of chocolate chip cookies we munched sitting cross-legged atop our giant bed. We watched the sky meander into a pink then purple ceiling. Stars began to peak through as the dark rolled in. We knew Venus was the first to show her face, then Saturn, not as bright.
We lay back breathing in the hush of night and listened to the hum of insects and the distant call of starlings folding their heads under their wings for the night in their treetop roost. The flaps and splashes of mallard wings in the nearby pond were common. The crackle and swish of branches in the nearby woods were deer grazing before settling for the night— all were familiar.
I reached out for Carol’s hand, not because I was afraid, but because of our special bond, our attachment to this space that was ours alone in the safety of being held by Earth and sky— far away from my violent life at home.
“Look!” she said, pointing toward the worn-out hills in the shadow of night, “A shooting star. Make a wish!”
“Okay, I said, hoping she wouldn’t ask what I wished for.
“Don’t tell,” she said, giggling, “or your wish won’t come true.”
I could never tell her about my longing for a normal life, a life I wouldn’t have to live in secret.
“I brought a jar for catching fireflies.” she said, finding the jar in her bag. “We’ll make a firefly lantern to keep by our bed for the night.”
It was easy to capture the flying blinking bugs as they flew and hovered right at our height. Their tiny legs felt like feathers on our cupped hands. These insects didn’t seem to mind being captured and jarred in their flashing lantern.
As our jar perched beside our bed, we lay back and identified Big and Little Dippers and the Milky Way, like a white wave break, streaked across a sea brimming with stars. In low voices we talked about our futures. Would we marry, have children, careers? Would we live near each other? Yes, we said we would do all those things and live next door to each other. But in my heart, I knew I had to escape, move far away from the chaos that was my life.
We fell asleep with the crescent moon high in the sky, the air thick with the scent of drying clover, and the night cool enough for slumber.
Now, many years later, when I see a field of daisies I remember our tent, our closeness, our shared lives. When I pass a cemetery in the summer, I think of the cool marble above the souls we touched and the thrill of breaking the rules at night. When hay is cut in nearby fields I still feel the night embracing us on our bed of hay when the stars belonged to us.