We are wild girls in our Seaside Avenue yard, with our fierce yells, pinching, hitting, pulling of hair, that intermingles with our belly-crawling, in-the-dirt, tangled play as I boss my sisters and the girls next door, with my hands on my hips, ordering them first we play dodgeball, then ring-a-levio, break into teams where we capture the enemy and put them in an old trailer with a hitch – that’s the jail – or tag or kickball, and then we’ll swing on the neighbors’ swing and slide on the slide, and climb the old crabapple tree, and when we’re done with all of that, I’ll make them play ring-around-the-rosie for little Maria until we fall down too pooped to do anything else, yet, out will come the colored construction paper, the ordering of collecting leaves, and showing Barb how to paste the leaves into a figure, with a leaf head, arms, body, legs, and don’t forget to draw a red-crayoned smiley face so you have something to smile back at, which only leads me to make a family of puppets out of cardboard so I can put on a made-up puppet show, in-between telling them to shut up and listen until that’s over and I’ve had enough and take some space to think, lean my cousin’s hand-me-down ten-speed bike up against the big oak tree, thrilled by the ride down the slope of the yard on a bike way too big for me until Mom comes outside and orders me off that bike – it’s way too big and I’ll break my neck – (soon she makes the bike disappear, like she did with my cat), but I don’t care, it’s freeing to glide until I get scared and stop before I do break my neck, ignoring Mom as she tells all of us to be quiet and turns to the house again, leaves us in peace until our scratching, fighting, mixed-up running around leads Donna off to a corner of the yard to talk to herself, leads me to venture into the other neighbor’s yard, where I’m not allowed, to steal stalks of tart rhubarb, and it’s not that I even like the taste of it, I just want it, like I want a lot of things that I don’t have and I can’t get, however, it doesn’t matter, because I don’t care, a new dress doesn’t hide the wild girl that I am, the girl that’s growing up quick, learning the ropes, dealing with the crappy things in life, the things that twist my stomach, that make the fight or flight feeling juiced up in a second, that leads me to lose some of my bossiness as my shy tongue freezes, and makes me think that our life’s going to be tough for a while, maybe longer than awhile, which is confirmed as our wild girls’ fierce shouts in this short childhood time expel forward to the wilder teenage years and to the wild women we become.