Paths Home, Step on a Crack & Fireside Friends

Being a 'latch-key' kid of a single mom in the mid-1970's was kind of cool... in a cutting edge way.
While other kids had a schedule with which they expected to adhere, I could kind of make my own as long as all was good & done by the end of the day.
This sometimes meant watching Gilligans Island while Suzie did homework or playing in the hose while Dennis got whistled in by his momma for supper.
Every now and again, I would chase the ice cream man down the street with change stolen from my mother's jar.
I was a 'walker.'
Sometimes I felt like walking with Sabrina and she lived in the complete opposite direction. I would walk her home, eat whatever snack her mother handed out & then I would scoot on home.
Usually, I liked to take the 'cut-through.' I am not so sure that it was any less distance than any other way, but it was typically more peaceful & therefore the path I preferred, unless I felt like company. In the 'cut-through' path, I would venture out the side exit of the school building and cut through the fields that ultimately fed into the local high school. There, at the high school, I could walk the lap around their track and sometimes, I would venture into their expansive halls. Halls that had big-kid things...like lockers and vending machines. In the ominous halls, I would daydream about one day having a spin at their potters wheel or wearing wooden shoes that would echo down the hall & out to the world...'I am big!'
On the far side of the high school campus was a slightly worn path that cut through the woods and fed out to the street about five doors down from my house. I liked this trail, because I could walk leisurely & stop along the way... saving rolly-pollies, chasing butterflies & sabotaging massive anthills with sticks found along the way. I rarely saw other folks on it...occasionally a high school smoking. Looking back, I guess the desolate nature of this path was why Dennis & Lara told me that their mother's didn't allow them to take the 'cut-through' even though Dennis had taken it more than a time or two with me.
Rarely did I like to take the sidewalk. But if I was busy jabber-jawing and wanted to walk with friends, this was the route I would take. Solid sidewalks...from the main entry of my elementary school all the way to my house. It was also the path that almost all of the 'walkers' on my side took. To me, this meant getting stuck behind someone slower or having to cut-off into someone's yard or the street. It also meant having to either listen or talk to some folks I would just rather not deal with. This was the route that my mother had pointed out to me when we relocated there. I imagine, it was the path she preferred & probably thought I always took.
~~~To Read FullStory, In Order, Read Post Above Now, Then Continue Below~~~
For whatever reasons, the next afternoon I took the 'sidewalk' home. But I wasn't jabber-jawing and I wasn't walking with friends. I was walking alone in a swarm of kids. I was trying to be patient & not pass anyone in people's yards or the street. To slow my pace, I looked down & focused on the ground before me & not the kids in front of me that were walking too slow. To entertain my attempt at patience, I decided to step on every single crack in the concrete. Man-made cracks every three feet & crumpled up cracks from bulging tree roots...I stepped on them all.
With sirens faintly echoing off in the distance, I heard a familiar voice bark out at me "You trying to break your mothers back?"
I stopped and leered at Dennis, who had come up behind me..."No-oh, I don't believe that stuff."
"Yeah...but what if..."
Picking up my pace & still leering over my shoulder at Dennis, I started to say something rude and instead said "firetruck."
I could see it down our long stretch of road... a good 6 blocks off but coming our way.
Dennis turned and looked at it real quick and then piped off with 'Probably going to your house, since you been stepping on all them cracks."
"Don't say that Dennis"
"I'm only kidding"
"I know...but still."
The trucks passed us, turned up ahead & sirens disappeared.
Dennis joined me & we both picked up stride, passing the masses...not that we felt pressed to get anywhere. It's just what we did when in the herd-mentality, we liked to be at the front, even if we knew all the kids would be at home before we got to our final destinations.
At the four-way stop sign, where Dennis usually took to the left and me to the right, we stopped for a moment. Plopping our books on the concrete ditch coverage we sat over the world below and talked. We talked about car washes for money, the neighbors bunny farm & about how snobby-nosed Abbie thought her cousin looked like the Fonz, which ultimately made her as cool as sliced bread.
Finally, we heard the whistle of Dennis' mom.
Dennis headed off to the left & I took to the right.
My head must have been down to the ground, because at first I didn't see it and I know I should have.
Black smoke. Not gray, not blue...black.
Rolling, tumbling, lapping like the parched tongue of a dog in the dead heat of the summer, the smoke made it's way through the trees and into the sky.
I picked up my pace, thinking 'Oh yeah, there were firetrucks.'
Two more houses down, my stomach jumped to my throat, my heart sank to my groin and I dropped my books in a mad dash.
Then, I froze in my tracks...in the middle of the road and I let every doubt and every belief and every fear and every day dream I had ever had, every crack I had ever stepped on leached out of me in a scream....."DENNIS!!!"
Somehow, in an instant everything in my head placed blame on him & everything about me needed him more than ever.
Two doors down from my house, Dennis sat on the curb with me, as the firemen did their job.
"You should tell them."
"No, not yet"
After the fire was extinguished and the yellow tape was drawn...Dennis & I ventured closer to the house. The doors were gone, the windows were gone, the white brick was crumbled in some spots and was charred black & gray all over. Through the saturated & stained rumble I could see straight into the kitchen & hanging from the center wall was our phone ... a red wall-mounted rotary phone. It was stretched out to the floor, numbers in circles spanning two feet... like me, melted in its' place.
"You gotta tell them before they leave."
"See my phone? What am I gonna do? I was waiting to call my Mother first."
(Paths Home, Step on a Crack & Fireside Friends is from my imagination, not my past...a first for me here)
Today, the phone hangs, all five feet of it, like artwork from the kitchen wall.