There are some times more than others when I miss family. Labor Day weekend is one. Funny that it's not the Forth. They were both big Yates family get-together days, probably still are, just I haven't been to anything since Daddy died. I got asked to Uncle Tom and Aunt Dot's anniversary a few years back but I was in one of my intend-well, do nothing modes and not only didn't do the gift thing I had planned, I didn't even RSVP when I realized there was no way I could manage it all. I know why I am all family fractured. Don't know why Glenn doesn't keep up with anybody but Aunt Harriet.
Still, I miss them all now, or maybe miss the people we used to be.
We would run around acting crazy and generally making nuisances of ourselves. We'd chase each other around and over the loose hay and baled in the barn loft and sit there with daring, dangling our feet out the wide loft window. There were tadpoles in the pond to catch and kittens to scratch the daylights out of us when we tried. Green persimmons were for shoving onto the end of sticks and flinging as far as we could.
After we ate, in the long afternoon's heat, there was Yellow Creek to go to. Clear as pale green glass, sparkling with minnows, and fed by springs said to be 52 degrees the year round. I couldn't swear to the temperature, only know that the first dip in would take your breath and there wasn't anyone, man, woman or child who didn't have to climb, blue-lipped and shivering, out onto the rock to thaw in the hot sun. And repeat until exhaustion made us cross and we were hauled back up to the house to shuck out of wet bathing suits in the hot, tin-roofed attic with its blue-black dirt daubers. We would collapse up there. I could still feel the movement of the water around me in my sleep.
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