Dirty Feet

I want dirty feet. I want summers of cousins and aunts. I want dodge ball and Miss Mary Mack. I want jacks and marbles. I want fishing and eating baloney sandwiches on white bread.

A sweet melancholia visits every summer and punctuates the losses that arrive throughout the year, year after year. We are all in mourning for those moments when freedom and joy didn’t have to be negotiated and when we were ignorant of our own happiness.

I had few obligations. My cousins and I were dropped off at my grandparents’ rural Alabama home and two aunts who were teachers and had summers off would come also and spend three months caring for us. I hate to think of the boredom they endured, but I am grateful.

I worry sometimes that children no longer experience these kinds of mostly unorganized, unscheduled days. My aunts would feed us in the morning and then open the door and unloose us on the world. It was up to us to do the day in whatever way we wanted and up to them to eyeball us often enough to ensure our survival.

Unplan, children. Just for today, maybe, may you have dirty feet.