play ball
The days are getting shorter and the neighborhood kids hope to stretch the hours of the last few weeks before school begins. They were playing in the lot adjacent to the house with an assortment of bats and balls. There were wooden bats and plastic bats and plastic balls and tennis balls. I don't recall seeing a softball in the bunch. It makes me a little nervous, because the living room window could easily be broken. So far, there've been no accidents.Tonight they played until about 10:00 pm, well after sunset. The kids wanted to continue to play and asked me to turn the porch lamps on. I told them that it was late, so I'd rather not. An hour later, there was the sound of running back and forth on my porch, an incredible amount of racket, so I opened the main door (which I normally don't use) and peered out to see a girl at the door waving a big shovel high over her head. She was somewhere around the age of 12, and was not much larger than the shovel. For a second it seemed menacing, because she faced me with a grip on the shovel like a baseball bat.
I and asked quietly, "What do you think you're doing?" She looked startled and said "I'm trying to keep the light on!" There's a little motion activated light in the corner which will stay on all of three seconds when activated. I suppose for the last half hour or longer she had been swinging the shovel around the light to keep it going. I told her she looked like she was prepared to break something. She looked at her hands and at the top of the shovel and said "Ohhh, Noooo." I laughed to show I was joking.
"We can't leave until we get her out," she explained motioning with her head towards the far end of the field. I couldn't see "her", but there was something out there...a dark form that quickly dissolved into the shadows of a nearby home.
They seem like a decent bunch of kids. I just thought it was hilarious. The next time you see someone at the front door waving a shovel over their head in the middle of the night, they may just be playing ball.
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