Just Out for Soda

“Dad, where are you going?”  Laura saw my hand on the knob, ready to leave the air conditioning and step out of the house.

“Just out for a soda.”  I love summer nights, no matter how hot and sticky.

“Can I come?”

“Sure, but we’re walking. Feel up to it?”

“Yep.”

She followed me out the door, put her hand in mine and we strode off into the dark. Well, as dark as a suburb can be with lighted streets and houses. The scents and sounds of summer after nightfall delight me, and I took a deep breath while focusing my hearing.

It was too good not to share.

“Laura, stop and close your eyes.”

She gave me a questioning look, but complied.

“What can you hear?”

She stood in silence for a moment. “I hear bugs.”

“Good. What else?”

“A dog, no two dogs barking.”

She was beginning to get it.

“Air conditioning. Wind chimes. A bullfrog.  By the lake? No, in the creek. The leaves blowing in the breeze.”

She cataloged everything she could hear that hot night, and I stifled a chuckle.

“OK, now what can you smell?”

She kept her eyes closed and inhaled.

“Sweet. Is that? It is. Honeysuckle. Grass, cut just this afternoon. Dust from the Millers’ gravel driveway. But the hot asphalt in the street’s the strongest.”

She opened her eyes and knit her brows. “Why, Dad?”

“This is the way summer sounds and smells. We can’t keep this season all year. So whenever we want it, all we have to do is close our eyes and remember.”

Thirty years passed, and I opened an email from Laura.

“Dad,” she wrote, “I took Isabel for a walk to get a soda last night. Halfway there, I made her stop and close her eyes.”

William R. Bartlett lives in Belton with his family.