Box Fan Memories

The air conditioner is out at school and we've had an incredibly warm March - 85 degrees! Some classrooms were registering over 90 degrees inside and my wintery maternity wardrobe is just not cutting it.

Box Fan Memories

My kid won't inherit my box fan stories.

She won't know stiff school uniforms causing sweaty, squeaky seat imprints on resin chairs

or the July morning sheets that feel like camping before nighttime evaporates in wobbly waves of heat.

Worst of all, I suppose she won't understand why box fans mean pea soup paste, or spaghetti, spaghetti, spaghetti,

or walking to the pool with the faded black lane ropes.

It's a shame she won't know cicadas smelling of broken walnut rinds.

Big Wheels with smashed big wheels slide to the bottom of the hill

while the others take off their shoes to walk through rain gushing in the steaming asphalt gutter.

I doubt she'll receive a plastic coin purse near a rush of warm circulating air.

Paisley imprinted, it snapped around my Donald Duck stickers and two coins for an ice cream sandwich

at the pool that had painted black water levels until they changed them to blue.

She won't have knowledge of smoke, impervious to buzzing blades

or the sideways snip of peppermint from the freezer.

Twist it back up. Put it in a chest pocket.

And she'll never get to sit on the patio with the cicadas and the concrete bench.