Peppermint Twist

Second grade, we lived on Cindy Street, cul-de-sac where I rehearsed my confusing life with the usual quilt of friends, freckled, all white, and carrying board games like clubhouse passwords from front yard to back. Risk and Chutes and Ladders. Cootie catchers. We sucked honeysuckle sap like rare elixir from the bush at the bottom of the street where the school bus stopped for us weekday mornings.

There too at the end of our street was with a pond, muddy with pollywogs mimicking our own growth on squat legs. If you turned right at that corner and kept going there was an coveted destination two blocks farther, a house where three playmates mirrored my own sibling trinity of two girls and a boy and the most exotic mother in the entire neighborhood. This woman with yellow hair was bewitching, had a husband of her own, of course, but she bought holiday gifts for a select share of kids in her periphery, presents that surely unsettled our own mothers. Tiny, heart palpitating bunny rabbits at Easter, for example, that grew into large ones that we had to keep caged in the garage feeding them wilted, disgusting smelling lettuce that would've otherwise been discarded.

This goddess of a mother who we all secretly wanted as our own also taught us to dance, the day's most lascivious dance, the Peppermint Twist...

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