Kids on a hill

My neighbor comes out and yells up the hill. “It’s like an amphitheater out here.”

I laugh and agree. But, I guess we are being loud, free with our words, obnoxious maybe. The grass is lush beneath our feet and we make a playground of the hilltop.

We talk in silly voices to our babies who are growing like trees in the orchard. They are walking, jumping, picking green apples, singing “Ring around the Rosie” and falling to the ground before the song says so.

We take pictures. We take notes in our heads. We take in the day’s innocence and let it hit our faces like the warmth of the summer light. It is a day so different from last year when my sisters drove hours to visit, not knowing we were about to go to war.

Like our teenage selves, we called each other names and vowed never to speak again. But time marches on and hard feelings do too.

“What’s auntie doing?” my son asks as his aunt kneels to the ground. The urge to roll has come over her. “Do you want to roll?” she asks him. He stands with curiosity, All the cousins gather, but they are too tiny to grasp the concept. It is the older among us who want to roll.

I think back to a time when our legs were half the size and we all lived under the same roof. We would run across the street to the field in back of my grandmother’s house. There was a hill, slightly smaller than the one before us today. It dipped down to a baseball diamond. Whatever the season, we would roll. We would roll until our heads spun with delight, like bocce balls on a smooth, sandy surface.

I am seven months pregnant. There is no rolling in my future, only laughing, when my sister's decide it’s time. I head to the bottom, ready to video the two at the top. There is an “on your mark” from my brother-in-law. Then a “get set, go!”

Arms outstretch, torsos begin to tumble. They are sailing down the hill at the speed of paper airplanes. I get a close-up of my older sister nearly smashing into a tree. Her body stops before the trunk, but the laughter continues. She is apple-faced and out of breath, drooling from the natural high of her own amusement park ride.

The kids run down to meet us.

When the dizziness subsides, we rush to watch the video. The sun is brilliant to the west. We are all kids again, leaving our adult selves at the top and finding adolescence at the bottom.

Next year a new kid will join us on the hillside. A girl in my belly.

We will teach her to roll too.