Four

As I sit in the coffee shop a large, multi-generational and multi-ethnic family arrives and chaotically settles itself onto the outside patio. The family is mostly white but there is an Asian girl of about 10 with long black hair and thick glasses, and a beautiful Afro-American girl of about four with warm brown skin and bright eyes. She and her white sister about the same age hold hands as they find their seats; they are utterly adorable. I admire this family for giving these children a home and being open to diversity; they seem like a family worth knowing. All the children seem to get lots of hugs and attention.

The four year old is picked up by the older sister and held briefly, and I’m reminded of my sister Nell, seven years younger than I am. When she was that age, whenever she was asked any question she always responded by holding up four fingers and saying, “Four,” her age. So for quite awhile we all called her “Four.” She was the youngest of four children in the family, very cute with a pixie haircut and big brown eyes. She loved to ride piggy back and I would often carry her long distances on my back.

Four is a magical age. When Nell was four and I was eleven we were still living on Dewey Drive in Ellettsville and hadn’t yet moved to Sugar Lane. The three girls in the family shared a single bedroom, and there was only one bathroom in the little house.

In summer bands of kids freely roamed the little town with less to fear from strangers back then. We spent a large part of one summer digging deep holes under the gigantic sycamore in the back yard, and even dug recesses into their walls for little fireplaces, wisps of smoke rising from their separate earthen chimneys. Summer rains were bathwater warm. The water mixed with soil to form a rich brown soup that a child could convince herself was chocolate. Mud pies and thick concoctions of chocolate pudding and cake batter were poured from one container into another and baked in the sun.

The men in the neighborhood pooled their money and built a simple cement block swimming pool a few blocks away called the Turtleback Swim Club, and on many a hot summer evening my father could be persuaded to take us night swimming, the underwater pool lights shining mysteriously from the water’s depths. On cooler nights we would cling to the edge in the water near the lights for the small amount of heat they emitted. Back then, sometimes the chemicals weren’t right in the pool, but we swam in it anyway despite coffee colored water that turned our blonde hair a slightly green tinge. A four-year old could ride on her father’s shoulders and be tossed high into the air—could also pretend to be terrified at the bullet form of the father swimming swiftly underwater, grabbing her to toss her again high into the air or side with her in a splashing battle with the big boys.

Those summers, the creek nearby hosted minnows and crawdads which to their misfortune were sometimes captured and made into pets for awhile. A four year old was sometimes sent out with iced tea for the gardening father and rewarded with a taste of a lightly salted, sun-warmed tomato or green pepper.

Those were some of the good parts of being four. But don’t be fooled; there were terrors as well—a menacing older brother of ten who could spin out of control and other big boys rumored to kill baby birds and commit other acts of cruelty. The truth was, even then the world could be a complicated and scary place and nothing was quite what it seemed.