Suburban Goddess

As I ran through the neighborhood path today, I inhaled the crisp fall breeze and caught the scent of falling leaves and pine needles, suddenly remembering something I had not thought of in many, many years.

My father used to play softball with the Pearlington Volunteer Fire Department. I remember driving to the baseball diamond somewhere close my grandmother’s fishing camp… my friends and I would play in the soft dirt beneath the bleachers, running after one another and playing games. I remember the bright red jerseys of my father’s team; I remember the smell of home-cooked hamburgers coming from the concession stand. I loved the delicious sourness of those huge dill pickles; they were always my favorite. I was weird even then, nibbling away the skin and leaving the soft pulpy middle for last.

As dusk would fall, the lights high above the field would make that eerie hum as they warmed up… until they finally flooded the field with light. Mom would pull out the monstrous bottle of Skin-So-Soft, which was the redneck version of mosquito spray, and slather us down with the oily liquid that ran down between your fingers and somehow always ended up stinging your eyes. (Skin-So-Soft is one of those scents that always takes you back; I don’t know anyone who uses it for what it was originally intended for.) As the spectators would throw back Budweiser after Budweiser, no one notices that the kids now had oily zebra stripes where the fine dust mingled with the Skin-So-Soft… we were oblivious to it ourselves until the next morning when we would wake up with dirt everywhere.

Sometimes there would be shouts or cheers from the bleachers above us; the murmur of the crowd was comforting, always humming away in the background. As the night progressed, we grew exhausted until a point that we would climb into the bleachers, putting our heads on our mother’s laps or curling up next to one another like a litter of kittens. The “ting” and “thock” noises as the aluminum bat made contact with the ball… the metallic shake of the fence as someone would dive into it….the sound of the mothers’ voices gossiping as the air grew cooler…. until my dad would shake me awake, and carry my limp body to the car.

I remember laying in the back of the car on the ride home… the purr of the engine lulling me into the most peaceful sleep. Safe. Comfortable. Loved.

I long for that kind of sleep again.

This entry was posted on October 14, 2007 at 5:57 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.