The back yard
was large and fell away from the house toward the lake. The back patio was
decorated for the party. Big red letters spelling out Happy Birthday two feet
tall hung from a rope stretched from the large oak diagonally across to the
corner of the house and barely cleared the grownups heads. Two picnic tables
pushed together end to end were being loaded with food and place settings. Off
to the side, a smaller table held a big chocolate cake with eight candles.
“My mother
dirties every dish in the house when she cooks,” my mother said standing in the
kitchen at a sink full of sudsy water. “I end up having to clean the kitchen
every time we have a family gathering.”
“I don’t mind
helping,” my mother’s aunt Eunice said. “I like coming to the lake. It’s is so
beautiful here. Birthday parties are always fun for the kids.”
“Birthdays are a
lot of work,” my mother said. She looked out the window over the kitchen sink. “I
hope that cake survives until time to cut it.”
Hal, my first
cousin, was nine years old. He was circling the cake and testing his luck with
his index finger. The icing on the cake was too hard to resist. His mother
finally caught him chocolate fingered and hauled him away.
My grandmother
brought out a big platter of fried chicken. “I love weekends and birthday
parties. She laughed. “It’s so wonderful to be able to cook for all my family.”
“Your house and
yard are so beautiful,” my uncle from Oklahoma said. He’d driven up to Illinois
with his family and arrived two days ago. “You must love living on here on Lake
Decatur in the summer.
“Yes, I do. I
love having the family come and stay on weekends.” My grandmother would make
pallets for everyone if she didn’t have enough beds. “Of course, the boys love
staying with us all summer.”
The boys, my
brother and I, liked the weekends when all our cousins came, but during the
week we were isolate with my grandmother all day. We worked beside her in the
flower beds, cleaning windows, and painting lawn furniture. She loved hugging,
and kissing, and buying us presents, but also believed idle hands were the
devil’s work. From the back yard, we
could see cars moving across the bridge that connected downtown Decatur with
our side of the lake, and every day around four o’clock in the afternoon, we
watched for our grandfather’s blue Cadillac.
When we saw his
car on the bridge, we would go and change into our swim suites. After he got home from the office, and as soon
as he changed clothes, we ran down to the dock and lowered the Chris-Craft down
into the water. The best perk of spending the summer with the grandparents was water skiing
and driving the boat. On weekends, when family came to visit, we got to spend
the whole day out on the lake.
“It must be wonderful to get to come down from
Chicago and enjoy the summers here in Decatur with you parents on the lake,”
Georgia, my father’s sister from Oklahoma said. She was sitting in a freshly
painted lawn chair.
“Oh yes, but it’s
a lot of work helping keep the place up,” my mother said. She placed the large
bowl of mashed potatoes on the table next to the fried chicken.
“I wouldn’t mind
hanging out at the lake all summer,” my aunt said.
“Come everyone,”
called my grandmother. “Lunch is ready.”
I would be glad when
lunch was over, and we’d lit the candles and sung happy birthday to my brother.
He was eight-years-old today. I wanted some of that chocolate cake before my
cousin, Hal, swiped all the icing.
