Spring is the best time of year, before people go away on summer trips or it gets too hot to sit outside, even near dark. Nobody owns a TV set yet, and even if someone has a radio playing, it doesn’t seem to bother people. A couple of times a week the marching band from St. Lawrence high school practices on the school grounds a block away. The only two songs they seem to know are Sweet Violets and I’ll Be Down to Get You in a Taxi, Honey, which they play over and over and over again, until all of us know every note and drumbeat by heart.

Sometimes after dark, we can see the beam of a searchlight in the distance and then, if he is in a particularly good mood, my father will back the car out of the garage and he and my mother and little sister and I will drive around till we track down the source of that light and then stop for an ice cream on the way home.

Sometimes, if there are enough children around, we have games of kick-the-can or wagon and bike races around the dirt oval by the garages, but most of the time there is simply the sitting and watching, the quiet voices and laughter from behind the porch railings.

And for those moments, no one is getting sick or dying. There are no impossible questions to ask or answer, nothing that needs to be done right now. We’re simply glad of where we are, all of us, as the night hawks dive and the searchlights search, far above us and forever.