Waiting for October

There's a point when a memory is recalled so many times that it becomes just a few images or a sound. Sometimes I try to grasp for those things so many times that it just becomes a mess in my mind.

One thing that's good about things you remember from your youth is they seem to be more associated with feelings than the later ones, or I feel that way in my case. One thing that always strikes a nostalgic chord with me is Polaris, and I've been listening to them a lot lately.

I get the natural images and memories from The Adventures of Pete and Pete, and everything associated with my pre teen years: like riding my bike on a summer's day to my friend's house down the street, where she had just assembled a tree house with her sister out of a literal tree that had fallen over in a recent storm.

She had perfectly pushed the leaves around to form rooms and cut windows by removing branches and forming holes. There were even doors assembled out of branches snapped and placed in the hallways. There were also many many ticks and other bugs, but that didn't seem to matter. This was cool, this was great and this was timeless.

We wanted drinks eventually and we went into her house, which also had these tiny hallways--obviously where she based her architectural preferences. We climbed up them in that way you always attempt as a kid--feet on one wall, pushing your back to the adjacent one and wedging yourself up near the ceiling. Her hallways were much more narrow than my own, so this was entirely possible and entirely BADASS since we would drop down and attempt some kind of ultimate ninja move in the process.

After this we went back down the road to my house on our bikes and met up with the girl that lived across the road from me. It had flooded everywhere so we waded in the disgusting standing water in the ditches by the road, probably filled with bacteria and diseases. Then I found a dead decomposed snake skeleton along the road, picked up a vertebrae with a stick and washed it in the stagnant water, satisfied that it was clean enough to touch.

We went up to the neighbor's house who lived on top of the hill in the woods and jumped on her trampoline. Her kids had grown up and moved away, so she was always fine with us using it at our discretion. What was great was the fact that the way up the hill to her house was thick with trees. Scattered throughout were these little piles of feathers, as if a bird had just exploded there. In the back of my mind I knew it was a fox or a coyote, but birdsplotion sounded cooler. Once we arrived where the trampoline was placed, it was completely open to fields and mountains on the other side of the hill.

We would lay there until the sun set, knowing it was time to go home once it was dark, but it was never really completely dark there. You could always see every star.