My Berlin summers

My Berlin summers
                        

Yesterday I sat outside and felt the summer settle around me: mid-July, no tinge of coolness to be found in the moist air. The cushions of the chair stuck to the back of my legs in the pleasing way it does in Ohio: that feeling when you know tomorrow will feel the same, that the warm weather won’t give way to frigid temps. I leaned back and closed my eyes and let it bathe me. I will take serenity in the smallest of pockets in time.

The reminders and little red numbers and signals on my phone blink for me to check them, and the tight pull of the time we’re living in comes flooding through me at all hours of the day.

For a millisecond I long for the stillness of my childhood backyard and a transistor radio I could bring with me to play the tunes of the day. I would set it on the ground, the AM crackling happy static-y songs as I climbed onto the rope swing that hung from the tallest of trees that grew in our backyard. I’d fly, fly, fly up near the leaves and around in a circle, the freedom that I had in my Midwest upbringing a jewel I cherish.

When I was bored with swinging, I would fill up my small plastic water bottle, place it in the flowered basket on my bike and head up the back alley for some adventuring. It’s not so much a back alley anymore as it is a freeway, wide and filled with a restaurant, a bank, a hotel and a condominium complex, cars filled with tourists as they meander through Berlin.

There was simple pleasure in having open space to yourself to breathe in the corn fields that surrounded you, small town America and life not filling me with the pressures that come with adulthood.

One day as I road my bike uptown, I decided it was time to go farther. I made it up to Pigtail Street, cut across the cemetery and found my way down to the dairy. I had never gone that far before and knew with the sluicing in my gut that Mom would be so mad. Yet it was thrilling as all clandestine outings are, and from the dairy I headed back uptown on the sidewalk. The wind was at my back that day as I saw my town through independent eyes, no parent watching the back of my head.

Those of us who remember Berlin as it was will often ponder its layout and contents, letting out a small sigh in reflection. Most times it’s a sigh we don’t know we’re relieving ourselves of. All of it is gone, save for a few of the buildings that weren’t torn down or turned into a touristy shop.

The house where I would sit on the porch with my friend on hot summer nights watching cars go by, the elevator uptown that used to be the place to park your car as a teen and be seen, and the dairy that haunts me in my dreams with its savory coneys — the tiny diced onions a must — and the crispest of tater tots. If I shut my eyes tight enough, I can taste their flavor on my tongue.

I don’t wish it back. I don’t. Along with what was were belief systems that may have seemed easier but that have been dismantled and should never be brought to life again. You can’t go back in time to what was thought were uncomplicated times — and you shouldn’t — but the memories that tickle you on a hot summer night never fade.

The collective consciousness of a bright stream of reflection that can make you gasp as it comes unbidden, unsought. And the bright flashing numbers on a small screen that draw you back into the now, the unthinkable age and year your body finds itself in, unbelieving that I could ever be this old.

The outline of my town never quite leaves me, and as I drive through it, I find myself seeing nonexistent outlines of buildings I once took for granted, haunted spaces existing only in the annals of thought and memory.

As I travel through her streets, my backyard and childhood space beckon me, but I know it’s a round trip. I can never go back as it once was, and I don’t want to. What I have now calls me to return, and I go inside my house on the west edge of Berlin and find my tranquility there.


Loading next article...

End of content

No more pages to load