We misbehaved in the usual ways in the summers when we were younger. From middle school through high school, my friend Lindsay every summer came and spent time with me at my grandmother’s house during our annual stint there. We snuck out at night and got unsafe rides with boys we didn’t know, zoomed off to bonfires on beaches with the misguided optimism that we’d be able to catch a lift home at some point. It’s lucky worse things didn’t happen.
She arrived one year and when we got up to the attic where we slept, she unzipped her duffel and dug through clothes to reveal three loose cans of Natural Ice, supplied by her older brother. We drank them warm that night as fast as we could.
We crept quietly from the attic, down the steep back stairs, and out a side screendoor without letting it slam, and out into the night. We rushed across the grass, climbed into a car and got whisked off to where there was fire on the beach.
Now, I’ve heard, the bonfires don’t happen because they draw the police; the drugs are expensive pills not older-brother-beers. And Lindsay is married and owns a house in the town where we grew up. I am making her a table as a way-belated wedding present from a board from the attic which was, for certain nights in summers half a lifetime ago, our shared room, snuck out of and back into, like youth in certain moments. I’m going to round the edges of the table, eliminate sharp corners; her second kid is on the way.
This is achingly beautiful to me.