Summer

Days are long now and I spend most of my time outdoors, in the small patio behind the kitchen. A tree taller than the building lives there. I like to chew the bark and dig around the roots. There are 2 young plants in pots, where I curl and sleep under the sun, dazed by the smell of the flowers. We have a small room to rest in the afternoon. It sounds like a confined, bare place but I cannot keep up what all the events in the patio.
The fence that separates us from the next house is broken at the edge and the kids next door peek on us and stick their tiny hands, trying to call our attention. A young boy throws plastic toys for us to play. Some kind of blue and yellow fish with wings and wheels ended up under a chair. It was so weird, so almost alive, that we couldn't break it to pieces as we did with everything else.
A couple of times, the children opened the door and we escaped through the parking lot, being back in minutes, scared and excited by all the animals moving and coming to sleep in the stalls.
Many birds circle the air over the patio. Animals that even my mother has never seen before. Big black birds called crows, jays and hummingbirds and the familiar sparrows. Eloisa hates them because they intrude in our land without asking for permission, eat all the insects that we allow with us and the seeds of our plants. That hatred will be a source of trouble in the future but at this point in my life, I respect her decisions.
On the streets in front of the house, big cars and trucks cruise without respect for the living. There is one in particular,people seem to love. It is a white square thing that comes announced by a repetitive tune, offering what I would later know as ice cream. The army of children breaks free at that call and follows it as they follow us, screaming in glorious expectation. It suddenly stops to deliver its treasures and then vanish until the next day. It is a summer tradition. I don't know where it lives the rest of the year. The tune of the truck is still anchored in my memory as a reminder of happy times. I love music but I love that one the most. Sometimes Elena or Jack sing it for me and I cannot repress my enthusiasm. I have to jump, need to dance. They look at me in disbelief. For them is harder to find joy.
One day, they took me downtown. The land of this pack is so big you could not walk through it in several days. A crowd of dog and human people was in the central square. It was hot. A hidden spring was blasting cool water. Children and fat women and tired workers got rid of their shoes, run across barefoot, leaving their opaques selves outside, suddenly covered in the glowing light of Summer.