You and your kids have been invited to a party where you don’t know anyone. The house has a large, wild yard, with trees to climb and an abandoned playhouse. A guy in a kilt is chopping freshly cut watermelons from the garden with an ax. Adults are lolling around, listening to jazz from a record player pulled into the garden (nice to see vinyl spinning again).
The kids are stand-offish at first, but after dinner you hear whooping in the dusk—the boys and girls have started a battle in the meadow, pine cones for grenades and stink bombs, sticks for swords and guns. The older ones are moving in slow motion, dying spectacular deaths. The little kids are leaping out from behind trees in ambushes. The choreography has the adults enthralled, although we pretend not to notice.
You think back to magical moments from your own childhood of long forgotten backyard parties, where loose and ungoverned games formed that could never have been planned.
Boat Sculpture by Nancy Rubins
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