I miss Septembers. And Octobers as well. I know it sounds a little crazy because it IS September, but it's not the Florida Septembers and Octobers I miss, it's the Midwestern ones.
Pretty soon leaves will start turning and the corn and wheat will be getting tall. Soon driving down a country road will mean being in a sea of golden fields and blue skies that go on for miles with little interruption except the occasional farm house.
I'm a country girl really, never have been one for crowded roads and busy places. There's something almost reverent in the sounds of trees, animals, and silence. I miss the space and freedom of fields and streams and small town streets that were safe to prowl from morning till the streetlamps came on.
I watch roads around here being repaved. Blacktop, concrete. There was a kind of excitement as a kid when the roads were oiled. Running across the surface as soon as the workers moved on, shoe soles melting just a bit as we did. The flecks of gravel and oil that stuck to bicycles as we rode over it. I don't think they do that much anymore.
I remember being barefoot. Everywhere. I remember being barefoot at church, shoes safely tucked away in the corner. I remember playing up and down the neighborhood, shoes were for babies. Up in trees, in Kmart, along railroad tracks, no shoes anywhere.
There weren't cell phones either, so everyone knew their own mother's voice calling from the front door. And we knew just how far we could venture and still hear her. We were allowed outside then too. In fact, we weren't allowed INside much. Only during heavy rain or when it was really, really, really cold. We had raincoats and snowcoats for all the other times.
Helmets, seatbelts and sunscreen. If you were wearing one, your parents became known as the weird crazy people.
We walked to the park, walked to the Dairy Queen (that wasn't even a brazier, if anyone knows the difference), walked everywhere we needed to go. It wasn't that we didn't have a car, we just didn't use it.
A story in progress
