prose by Elle Manara
Being the middle child of triplets, there is never a dull moment. Either two were in an argument and the other went to go tattle, or we were all wreaking havoc on our small town squashed between fields of onions and sunflowers. And, being three little kids, we outnumbered our parents by one extra tiny little body. I still think about the stress my parents must have been under from our, max, 3 feet frames. Which, eventually, led to my parents allowing us to run rampant in our backyard with little to no supervision. Bad decision on their part, but who could blame them?
Anyway, it was a hot summer day with heat billowing out from the road and the smell of baking grass filling the area. We were outside. The sight of our playhouse and the big monkey bar structure made to make us have endless fun was looking drab and boring to our kid eyes. As many things did after a week. This frame of mind led us to venture outside of our designated play area. At first, it was just the jungle-like area farther back in our yard. We would swing on the vines coming down from the trees and laugh our potty-trained butts off when the vines snapped and we fell on the cushioned earth below us. Then, we would crawl through the prickly bushes on the side of our house, getting cuts and scrapes on every inch of our skin until we were satisfied that we would be considered true warriors of the bushes. But things… spiraled out of control from there. We would climb the crabapple trees until we stopped falling out of them. We would army-crawl through the bushes until there weren't any bushes left to cut through. These adventures lasted about two days. Now, in my opinion, it should have ended there; we should have cut our losses and went to play inside for the next week. But no. We had to battle-cry our way out of that situation like true men and women. Fighting for our lives!
So, we didn’t stop. On the right side of the bushes was a fence. And on the other side of that fence was my neighbor’s house. We called her Chachi, like everyone else on our street. She was a sweet old lady who bought us birthday presents and came to all of our parties to celebrate another year of complete torture for my parents. And when we occasionally went to her house, she always had a bucket of candy that all old people just seem to have, and she would give us each a handful. (That bumped her up to my top 5 favorite people list very quickly.) So, it was two days after pushing our boundaries, and we were about to push them further.
This heart-attack-inducing adventure included leaving the safety of our property and venturing out! Into the real world! So we were set, having brought snacks and extra layers of clothes to protect our bodies from the snagging thorns and rocks from digging into our knees. In our journeys through the bushes, we discovered that right between the thorn bushes and our garage there was a hole in the fence separating our craziness from our sweet old neighbor. So we used this opportunity to sneak through. It was like moving from one world to another. We looked around the yard, my brother at the point of our positions to protect us from any rogue grizzly bears, with me and my sister bringing up the rear. In the middle of the yard it was wild and unkempt, for no one was able to mow her lawn and the only objects on the outside patio were a mismatched pair of chairs and a rickety old table. However, to the right… something we had never seen before. They looked like our own thorny bushes, not 2 feet from each other, separated by our rotting fence.
Though thorns weren’t the only things on these bushes. There were raspberries. And unlike the ones in our fridge, these were all different. Some were big and a dark red color while others were small with a yellowish tint to them. It was like we found a sanctuary, all on our own! We rushed over to the raspberry bushes and shoved each other out of the way, grabbing handfuls of the berries and stuffing our faces until we all had full tummies. Once again, we should have been satisfied. But we weren’t. We kept coming back. And back. And back. Until all the raspberries were gone and our parents started to question where we went for an hour every day. We were cautious at first. Making sure our parents were completely occupied in other work, and Chachi was asleep on her front porch. But we got messier over time. We didn’t even care whether our parents were busy or even whether Chachi was asleep or not.
This fact led us to our ultimate demise and the conclusion to our raspberry adventures. It lasted a week. It was like any normal day: we went to the fence, crawled through it, and threw ourselves at the raspberry bushes. It was honestly therapeutic, but that’s besides the point. We were shoving berries into our mouths when suddenly Chachi’s back door banged open. We paused what we were doing. And slowly turned around. We all locked eyes with Chachi. A broom clenched in her fist and surprise in her expression. She saw us, and we saw her. Her sudden surprise, replaced with anger and distress. Just looking at us with her eyebrows drawn and pinched lips, she took off about 7 years of my life. And we stood there. Not doing anything, our hands dyed red and purple with dust covering our legs and bodies. So we took the only plausible course of action, and fled. We could hear yelling behind us and banging footsteps. We only ran faster and faster. How could someone who looked so frail run so fast? Dust plumed behind us as we dashed towards the fence and back into our own yard. It wasn’t until later that we noticed the cuts and scrapes from fleeing the scene of the crime.
Our plan was to act like nothing was amiss, but this was proven difficult with our dusty and torn clothing as evidence against us. At the end of the day, our phone rang. Our tiny bodies tensed up as my mom picked up the phone and slowly developed a sour face. And, you guessed it, it was Chachi letting our parents know about our escapades and the detriment to her raspberries. We got in serious trouble. Like, serious trouble. But after a week, we forgot all about the raspberries and found a new adventure inside the house: the crawl spaces.