It is sweltering, and I remember how it would swelter when I was a child in Holbrook. Yet, we didn’t mind, somehow. We traipsed off to the woods, leaping over the brook to the big rock, then onto the log cabin, which some father in some distant past had built for the enjoyment of some unknown children.

Sounds like a fairy tale.

Or we went blueberry picking in a connecting woods we got to by filing down the sandy road to O’Han’s Farm, which no one farmed anymore, and beyond to the two pine trees — our picnic spot —  and then crawled to savor the low-bush blueberries.

One summer some of us had an elaborate game of cowboys, and we dressed in dungarees and long-sleeved shirts, and we pulled scarves over our faces and robbed each other. It went on for weeks, that game. We would rush out every morning to begin again, and I remember my mother amazed that we didn’t mind the heat.

Maybe we were 9. Which brings to mind a poem by the great poet Billy Collins

On Turning Ten

By Billy Collins

The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I’m coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light–
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.

But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.

This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.