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It wasn’t always like this. I remember it like any memory of a child. This place used to be a castle to me and my brother. We had spent hours roaming around the gardens on days when the weather seemed to be made in the dreams of children. When the sun hung in the sky until it grew sleepy along with us. When the bugs would be our playmates, and dirt wasn’t a nuisance, but the mark of a day well spent.
And when the sky seemed to cry in longing for the sun, we would explore the rooms of the house. Rooms that were empty for reasons we didn’t quite understand at the time. The rooms that made us feel like explorers uncovering magical chambers that possessed secrets we would never tell.
Somewhere deep inside of us, we had known it wouldn’t last forever, but it hadn’t mattered. We were the kings and queens of our own world. The summer didn’t need to last forever because there was no thought of the future.
Looking at this sad little house now, you never would think of the family that used to live here, the stories that were told, or the parties that were held when our parents had tucked us into bed and the only ones awake were us, the moon and her stars. Our watchful guardian of the night, lighting our way down the hall, out the door and into the back garden. My brother had told me that it was the fairies that drew us outside, that they wanted to dance with us. That the stars had descended from the sky just to light our way to a place where the summer would last forever.
But my brother had left. Moved away right after high school, got a job, got married. I try to talk to him about the fairies and the dirt and the stars, but he insists that they were simply lightning bugs. He tells me not to tract dirt into the house, to not fill my nieces heads with nonsense.
I don’t talk about that summer around him anymore. But sometimes, when the night is warm and the moon is bright, the stars come down and whisper in my ear, come, they say, come and dance with us. My brother may have forgotten that summer, but standing in front of that old, tiny, collapsing house, i know that the fairies still dance. I know that the stars will guide me to them when i’m ready and that the summer we spent here will wait in my brothers memory until he is reading to listen to the moon and her stars again.