ABSTRACT
It was two summers before I would put my thin-penny bus token in the slot and ride the Fifth Street trolley all the way to the end of the line to junior high. Life was measured in summers then, and the expression “I am in this world, but not of it” appealed to me. I wasn’t sure what it meant, but it had just the right ring for a lofty statement I should adopt. That Midwest summer broke records for straight over-one-hundred-degree days in July, and Mr. Calhoun still came around with that-old-thing of an ice truck. Our mother still bought a help-himout block of ice to leave in the backyard for us to lick or sit on. It was the summer that the Bible’s plague of locusts came. Evening sighed its own relief in a locust hum that swelled from the cattails next to the cemetery, from the bridal wreath shrubs and the pickle grass that my younger cousin, Bea, combed and braided on our side of the alley.
