9. Will and Me (cont.)

Still, the night magic would come back when the sun slipped away.

We wrote our names in the air with sparklers, played hide-and-go-seek, tag.

“Olley-olley oxenfree.” The words made no sense, but their meaning was universally understood.

Days we wandered through the woods, trying to avoid the omnipresent poison ivy. We dammed up small streams, pretended that the vegetable cellar dug into the hill behind the garages was our wilderness home, climbed the fruit trees. The trees yielded sour red cherries and fuzzy apricots. In late summer the grape arbor was fragrant with concord grapes, raucous with bees. A friend of my mother’s told us that if we swallowed the grape seeds they’d get caught in our appendix. Then we’d get appendicitis and have to go to the hospital for an operation. I thought how interesting it would be to go to the hospital, to have everyone feeling sorry for me. Still, I spit out the grape seeds.