"The Little Red Suitcase"

Every summer, just before school would get out, they would come. In swarms of red and black specks, looking like microscopic tubes of lipstick wore down to the very last remnants of color, the love bugs would smudge everything and everyone. Our dog Daisy, would nip at the air trying to catch them on a breeze. The most harmless of creatures and yet we still hated them, mainly because they were a nuisance. They’d get stuck on the windows, their carcasses littering the yard leaving piles of them as the sun grew hotter day after sweltering day. Sometimes it was so hard to see that Daddy would have to rub corn oil on the bumper and windshield just so he could see to drive us to church on Wednesday and Sunday nights. Even love bugs wouldn’t keep the Carters out of church.

Even though we went to church whenever the doors were open, I was such a cruel kid. I’d catch some love bugs “mating” as they flew and methodically pull them apart, watching them struggle to fly again after being separated from their mate. It never occurred to me that I was being mean, I just got so mad at them for doing that in public. Even if they were bugs, I didn’t care. It just wasn’t right.

Somehow the love bugs' arrival was welcomed, for it foretold that summer was here and the longer the love bugs stayed the cooler the summer was going to be. Any temperatures below a hundred were fine by us. We loved the sticky, balmy Mississippi summers when our backyard became our jungle playground. From late May to early September we were free to imagine ourselves in whatever world we created. Sometimes it was Tatoonie or Endor, fighting the evil Empire as imaginary Luke and Han freed the Rebels, but most of the time we played house, where I was always the “daddy” and Coley was always the “mommy.”

One time I insisted on being the “mommy” yelling to Coley, “I’m gonna be the mommy this time, you can be my baby instead of the daddy if you wanna?”

Coley didn’t like that very much and stomped her feet in the dirt marching towards the house with my Krissy doll in tow. I waited for Momma to yell my name thinking of a way to not get in trouble about this one.

“Jacqueline Leigh,” she always called us by our first and second name when she was mad about something, without a plan I just walked in as proud as you please yelling, “Nicole always gets to be the ‘mommy’ and I never do!”

“Just sit down there at the table and listen to me for a second.” She had caught the fight in the very beginning and knew just what to say to calm both of us down and keep the argument from going to blows.

“So, was there any blood?” She motioned to Coley with the broom in her hand. Nicole was sobbing in her chair, wiping her nose with her dirty shirttail.

“No ma’am,” we said in unison.

“Well then, go at it. Fight all you want to, so long as there’s no blood you’ll be alright.”

We looked at each other and then stared at Momma like an alien had taken over her stern but loving demeanor and replaced her with a crazy person. She returned to sweeping the floor as if nothing had happened. Her comment shook us so badly that after that, we forgot all about being mad at each other, walked back outside and proceeded to play tag under the elephant ears by the creek. We fought our little sisterly fights, or spats as we called them, on a daily basis over stupid and petty things like who got to be the "mommy." But we never stayed mad at each other for long.

Our favorite thing about summer was that Momma would let us play outside all day long, or at least until we got hungry or needed to pee. We stopped peeing in the yard when Cole got poison ivy on her butt.

Two summers before, Daddy had started building us a treehouse but never managed to finish it. All he managed to build was a ladder on the tree and a platform about six feet up in the tree. All that mattered was that we had a way of climbing that towering pine tree to get to the platform that was supposed to be the floor of our treehouse. We didn’t care that it wasn’t finished. We loved having a place to set up our “pretend kitchen” so we could play house and cook. We’d go fishing for minnows in the creek behind the house catching them with our play-nets and cook us up a “minnow stew.”

In the summer of 93’, Momma came into our playroom on a rainy day saying that we were gonna get to spend a month with our grandparents: Mi Maw and Pa Paw Kingston. I was so excited I just about peed my pants jumping on my bed, my paper dolls flying in the air around me.

Mi Maw and Pa Paw lived in Parchman, Mississippi way up in the northwest corner of the state. Pa Paw was a chaplain at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman where they lived in a large house on the grounds of the prison. Parchman was nothing but a wonderland to us, because Mi Maw and Pa Paw lived there. As I packed my little red suitcase, that had “Going to Grandmas” painted on the front with a picture of a little girl carrying the same suitcase, I imagined Mi Maw making snickerdoodles and serving us hot tea in the tiniest pink china set you’ve ever seen. The thoughts of sleeping in her humongous king-sized bed, snuggled up to her chubby arm made me giddy with anticipation. Momma made sure I packed all of the right things: undies, socks, shoes, pajamas, clothes for play and clothes for church. Since I had stuffed every one of my fuzzy animals in the suitcase and exclaimed while carrying it, “I’m ready to go,” the morning we left for Parchman, it’s a good thing she made sure I was ready in another suitcase. With Coley’s blue suitcase and my red suitcase safely stashed in the trunk of our 1989 Pontiac 6000, we headed north from Bay St. Louis.