Our Summer

Carolyn Hancock
6/16/10

My image is such a vivid one. My memory brings me back to a time when I felt an innocence that I hadn’t felt in an extremely long time. My best friend, something of a savior, was who made me, me. Heather, the best friend I speak about, and when I say best friend I mean the person I could spend weeks at a time with and never get sick of her, were together after school like we were every Friday. We were sitting in my room the day of my sister’s graduation when it started pouring rain outside, just all of a sudden. Something so beautiful, something we’d been waiting for. Listen, to the sound of it, the pounding that sounded on the roof, the light sounds it made while hitting the trees and the earth beneath the plants. The smell it gave, cooling everything down from a hot summer day. Heather looked me in the eyes, and we both grinned from ear to ear. Though lightning had started and the thunder was monstrous, we walked down the stairs hand in hand, and into the light pouring rain.
It was the first monsoon of the season. And I suppose you couldn’t even really call it a monsoon, because it was only the end of May, but it was our first rain on a summer day after a long hard winter. Heather and I were always able to somehow read each other’s minds; I always knew what she was thinking. We automatically walked onto the dirt path leading to the enormous swing set I owned and we sat. We sat, and then we started to swing. It seemed as if nothing in the world existed except us, the rain, and those swings. We swung until we felt like we couldn’t see the ground, laughing and throwing our heads back to feel the cool and wetness the rain brought upon our faces.
We were like this until our clothes clung to our skin and our hair was soaked through. We let the water seep into our skin and felt as though it would wet us to the bones. We didn’t talk about how life was or what we were worried about, because we didn’t have to. From all the swinging and dancing in the rain, twirling like there was no tomorrow, we found a sense of innocence. We found how we wanted to be always, and how we were going to make our summer feel like. Summer had always been our season where we would spend weeks at a time together, doing anything we felt like doing. But it was that moment, that small, insignificant moment that made us realize how much these tiny little memories were things we needed to hold on to forever. They were what connected us and allowed us to be so close for so long.