Memorable Day

The sun was beating down on my backyard so much that my skin felt like it was being burnt as soon as I walked out of the house in my swim trunks. I lathered on three squirts of Coppertone sunscreen and inhaled the smell of it along with the fresh lilacs that my mom planted in the flower box. It was the smell of July that I craved all through the winter. I couldn’t stand in one place for very long because the deck was scalding hot on the bottom of my feet. I did a little hop every 20 seconds to give them relief and was happy to see my dad bring out the garden hose. He sprayed my feet with a rush of icy water and shivered as the burning went away.

My friends Jessica and Nick waved hello as they came through the swinging fence door just like they usually did most days during those summers back in elementary school. They were only one street over in my neighborhood. Jessica would have her oversized pink and purple towel wrapped around her and Nick would have his goggles in place over his eyes, ready to jump in our round, above-ground pool. 

Today we had something new to try. The afternoon before we had rode our bikes to the “Four Quarters” store and bought five packs of the balloons that had a rubber band at the end of them so you could bounce them back and forth off your hand really fast. We were going to fill them up with the hose and have a water balloon fight. I stuck the hose in the opening of the first balloon and let it fill up. Nick and Jessica held it in place as we were suddenly stunned. It just kept growing. It became the size of a large watermelon. These were no ordinary balloons. We laughed historically as all three of us collectively poked it and made it wiggle. We couldn’t have a water balloon fight as it was probably 30 pounds, so we rolled it over to where the deck met the edge of the pool and let it splash in, making the same noise we did as we cannonballed in after it. We spent the day swimming around this giant green blob floating in the water, too fascinated to do anything else.