Growing up in the boon-docks, us kids had to use our imagination to keep ourselves entertained on those long hot summer days. The temperatures would climb, sweating humidity which by noon, would have enveloped all around you; so thick, you had to part it with your hands to move.
My parents both worked and back in my day and based on my parents’ income, we didn’t have full time babysitters to come over and keep a watchful eye on us. Daycare was not a thing, and Camp-Rich-Kids had been something I dreamed about after reading Nancy Drew. My dad was a garbage man and a week or longer at camp was just that, a dream.
But back to that dad who worked in garbage….we had garbage bags galore. Not the thin black ones like you buy in the grocery store. Our bags were ochre yellow made of a thick durable plastic. The rolls were nearly two-feet wide and endless. My dad kept them stashed in random places throughout our house and his garage.
We also had a house that sat on a nice sized hill. That house had a spicket. The spicket had a very long green hose.
Woosh!
Standing at the top of the hill in our bathing suits, my sisters and I would let the roll of connected garbage bags fly down and in a matter of seconds the hose would flow with water chasing the bags down the hill. A few seconds later…
Woosh!
The three of us would slide down our homemade slip and slide.
Sometimes it got scary. Water, fifty-feet of plastic and three feral girls didn’t always mix. No matter how many times we would pull rocks or twigs out from under our water track, someone always found another as their butt or belly skimmed over it. Trust me when I say this, it really hurts when a pebble the size of a nickel hits the bottom of your ass at two miles per hour. Speed wasn’t good when you ran out of bag and all that was left was sod. All my bathing suit bottoms looked like they had been attacked by a cheese grater by mid-June. How we never lost teeth, broke bones and ended up in the emergency room still marvels me to this day. We were filled with bumps, abrasions and gashes for sure.
Boy, did my dad get mad.
“God Damn-it. Look what you did to the yard.”
We thought after hiding the shredded plastic roll of trash bags, winding the hose ever so carefully, (my dad has a thing about that), hiding our ruined swimsuits in the laundry and “fluffing” the smoothed-out path down the hill he would never have known about our adventures. Let’s be honest, after five hours of sliding down any hill there is no point in fluffing up anything. The giant mud puddle at the bottom was a dead giveaway. One just doesn’t fluff up a six-by-eight puddle in the middle of the yard.
“Don’t you turn that damn hose on while I’m at work!” He would bark as he got into his pumpkin orange, city issued El Camino. “We have a well and that thing isn’t bottomless!”
Oh, dad, how we failed you as children. Of course, we turned on the hose. After all, it was summer and the heat sweated humidity like a hose flows over fifty feet of ochre yellow garbage bags.
Chris Writes 