COOL MOVE

SCHOOL'S OUT, SUMMER'S IN. THE SEASON IS RIPE FOR FREE-RANGE KIDS, ICY FRUIT POPS, AND—SIGH—CHANGE.

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Summers, Josh and I ventured to the store together. I could walk through the backyard to my friend Lisa’s house alone. Or to the corner to meet Dad’s bus. Or to school, almost a block away. But the store was much farther, possibly two blocks, at the bottom of a hill. I only made that journey beside my older brother.

We weren't yet on the allowance payroll. Somehow, probably pleading, we would build up a stack of coins and announce we were making a store run. On our last one, we talked over the news: Our family was leaving Minneapolis. Moving sounded odd. Palo Alto seemed so unlikely; California didn’t even have snow. So we focused on the bigger shocker—that adults made decisions without us.

How? We kept good track of them. Eavesdropped routinely. Pestered. They must have cooked up this scheme at night, while we were asleep. I’d always found bedtime suspect, assumed I was missing out. Here was proof.

At the store, we dragged our fingers across boxes of nails, bins of clothespins and bundles of rope, to the back—even darker than the front, like the dugout where Laura Ingalls Wilder lived after she’d been forced to move, twice.