So this one day I forgot to pay my cell phone bill,

During the summer, my parents put me in charge of my cell phone bill.

I have few responsibilities during those three months. It's expected that I will wake up on the days my mother works and watch my brother until my grandmother arrives. It's expected that when my father needs a gallon of milk I will be willing to get it from the store. It's expected that when either of my sisters decide to have a slumber party, I will relocate to the basement.

It's just as expected that I can pay for my cell phone bill.

Now, in July this summer I forgot. Because I forgot, when I tried to call my friend early one Sunday morning the comforting "AT&T" sign was gone and my calls would not go through. I wrote a mental note to pay as soon as possible and called her from the house line.

Well, that night while curled up in my room reading a book the power went out.

As always happens I lost my breath for a second. It's the same sensation as stepping into thin air when you think there's a step beneath your feet. The air conditioner stopped buzzing over my head and suddenly the only light in the room was coming off my computer screen. I heard my brother call my name from downstairs, while right outside the door my sister groaned, "Aw, crap."

The power goes out a lot around my neighborhood. There are too many people living in too small an area and for some reason the electric company can't handle it. Especially in the summer. I like to think that the wires just get too exhausted out in the sun and the worker's main responsibility is to show up and compliment them into working again.

I dog-eared my book and closed it in my lap. I shut my computer screen and got up from the floor. Grasping the side of the bunk beds I found my way to the hall. I could already hear my family fussing downstairs. My brother was scared of the dark and as I reached the bottom step I scooped him up from where he was crying. Then I headed straight for the door.

"Stay inside," my mother said weakly, but this was the form our conversation had taken all summer. She would tell me to do something just because it was old pattern. Just because she wished to pretend I wasn't her daughter who was in college already. I opened the door anyway.

I stepped onto the stoop and let the door swing shut behind me. My sister had moved on to asking my father for a ride to her friends house but he was refusing. He claimed she could live without air conditioning for an hour. I heard my mother open a kitchen drawer to grab some candles. All this was silenced as the door closed.

I dropped Ross to the ground and he quickly hopped down the stairs so he could pick leaves off a bush. Laughing at himself every few seconds he contributed to the background noise. I also remember the buzzing of the street lamp and a distant sound of a car starting. I'm sure there was also some wife shouting at some husband about her impatience with some problem.

I had an overwhelming sense of nostalgia that day. I was breathing in hot humid air that was rising in misty clouds off the sidewalk. This was air I hadn't breathed since I had last played out on the street as a kid. But why should it make me sad? Wasn't I still a kid?

I wasn't. Sure, I was only in college, but the days of kick ball and manhunt were long gone. I would never be small enough to fit in the crack between the house and the hedges again and I would never get to grasp a friends hand nervously as whoever was 'it' creeped by our hiding spot.

I sat there for close to two hours as my neighbors went in and out. That air smelled vaguely of our garden, but also of the exhaust from the cars, and some scent that we do not have in Houghton. It smelled of the Italian mom's cooking and of the Ralph's ice wrapper Kari had left at the base of our mailbox. It had a slightly metallic smell from when our neighbor's son had scrapped his scooter along the pavement of his driveway.

As I smelled this air I watched my brother and knew that alot of people would not see my childhood as ideal because I didn't have a yard to play in. I didn't have any grass to smudge my jeans on and I didn't have any trees to fall out of. But I watched as another little boy came over curiously to see what Ross was up to and I knew that I had something on the yard playing children - I always had kids to play with.

And so I sat. And smelled the air. Why did I smell the air of my childhood?

Because I forgot to pay my cell phone bill. I had no one to call.