He’s thinking about those summer evenings. There’s something about that word evenings that includes the entire transition of day to night. Whereas, summer nights, seems to be something that occurs well after dark, somewhere other than home.
Summer evenings conjures up thoughts of childhood. Evenings that began when excused from the table, having swept the floor and cleared the plates and received the nod, he slipped out of the screened porch door to begin a summer evening.
The ranging summer sun provided the backdrop for pitch and hit against the garage door. Or an unbelievable neighborhood game of running bases. When he was young, the older boys, the ones running the game, didn’t pay much attention to him. But he knew when he was growing up because he became a threat on those bases. But in the mean time, he would run like the wind through the cut grass in bare feet, sliding from bases to base in the first remnants of evening dew to emerge on the tips of the grass blades.
On one evening, memory does not serve him well here as to why, but he was pulled by his mother from the peak of the evening and sent to his room till morning. He sat on the floor under his wide open window, with his back to the wall, and listen to the sounds of the summer evening.
Like a Polaroid becoming clear, he was able to determine from the many voices, that one parent was taking the whole crew to the Dairy Queen in town. Voices and footsteps, as each ran to their perspective homes to clear it with the parents. He decided to try the same. No, was all he heard. He returned to his room and assumed the same vantage point under the window.
As the kids piled into the car for the short trip to ice cream nirvana, he listened. As the excited voices were muffled for a moment as the car doors slammed, and then reemerged as windows were rolled down, he listened. As the engine pulled the car of kids up the road to gone, he listened.
To the sounds of summer evenings, he listens.
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