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CHILDHOOD SUMMER

On a day in late July, I venture outside carrying ice water for my pets. A wall of heat, thick as tar, stops my breath in my throat and makes me weak. Water splashed from the dish as I set it down. I watch the spill spread and imagine the start of steam, but do not wait to see. Instead, I retreat indoors where cooler air lets me breathe again. I drop into a chair, close my eyes in relief and recall childhood summers when the heat was my friend.

Summer days stretched long then, our fun limited only by our imaginations. Each morning, five of us met under the cherry tree at the back of our yard: three sisters from my family, two from a neighbour's. We lay on our backs under the tree's low-growing branches and stayed there until we'd planned the perfect fantasy for our day.

As the eldest, my job was to keep the others focused on their roles until nightfall. We were witches, princesses, movie starlets. We were dancers in Broadway musicals. We'd been captured by kidnappers and must escape or we were the kidnappers, planning an abduction. A round bush grew in our backyard against the fence. It was covered with red berries, inedible but perfect for tinting our skin. We became native Indians, guarding the hearth.

Eventually, our love of performance always branched out, and combined with a need for pocket money, we would plan the most important event of our summer, our yearly backyard fair.

As the oldest kids in our neighbourhood, we thought it only natural that we would share our dubious talents with the younger children nearby. We created invitations, sprinkling superlatives that told what fun a nickel's admission would buy. Buoyed by forecasts of our profits, we delivered them door to door. Once we were done, we ran back to the old cherry tree, dropped on our tummies and scurried underneath to the cool, dark shade, where serious planning could begin.

That last summer fair is the one I remember most, the one that marked the divide between my childhood and my adolescence. Quickly, dreams of romance were replacing my fairytale fantasies. The sense of things never being the same again fueled my efforts to make the fair special.

It was.

We set up two tables with good for sale. We piled used toys, clothes, records, books and knickknacks on the first. Each item had a price attached, ranging from a few cents to a quarter. A second table held baked goods, cut into portions and wrapped in waxed paper. There were bags of popcorn, freshly popped that morning, salted

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