The Bell – Hanging Out

Gordon was my next-door neighbor; we were the same age and best friends.  We both loved to play in the ditch behind our houses that drained into the swamp.  His parents had hung a large old ship bell on the pecan tree that shaded their front yard.  When it was supper or bedtime, they would ring the bell and we would come running.  We could hear the bell in most of the places we played like the bamboo growth at the end of our street, or Dead Man’s pond that was several blocks away and at the edge of the swamp.  The neighbors across the street had huge backyards that were our ball fields and led to our elementary school.  Standing at the edge of our elementary school, we could still hear the bell. 

Yesterday, I heard the bell, and I had this image of Gordon and me looking at each other and then running home.  Gordon’s mom was a nurse, tall, thin and constantly smoking.  My mom was a little over five feet tall and very petite.  Both were standing under the pecan tree talking.  When they turned, both Gordon and I said together, “Can’t we hang out just a little longer?”  One of my mom’s favorite poems was Birches by Robert Frost.  The poem is about a farm boy too far from town for baseball and real friends, so he learned to play alone and became a Birch tree swinger climbing to the tops and then flinging feet first with a swish, kicking through the air to the ground. 

As my mom’s cancer journey got harder, she would ask me to read Birches and always had me repeat her favorite line , “I’d like to get away from earth awhile / And then come back to it and begin over.”  Today I do body and bone scans in preparation for a meeting with my oncologists on Monday.  The last two weeks I have only been on one oral chemo, washing out the other chemo from my system, so today’s scans will serve as a baseline for the infusion I will start next week.  This week as I have thought about my cancer journey getting tougher, I couldn’t help but think about my mom’s love for the poem Birches and her need to get away for a little while, to swish back and begin again, but then I heard the bell, and heard myself say, “Can’t I hang out just a little longer?”