Swings, Peach Blossoms, and a Kiss

It was 1980, I was six years old.

In all honesty, this could have been 1979 but because I remember a total of four things about my kindergarten school year; the smell of the paste, painting on the easels, naptime mats, and the miniature bathroom at the back of the classroom, I would venture to bet this memory stemmed from my first grade year.

My family was living in Downey, California just a couple of blocks from my grandparents. I didn’t realize it at the time, but our house was the exact same floor plan as theirs. Very small, two bedrooms, one bath, and a detached garage with a sizeable yard. We were a family of six.

Before and after school my mom would watch a boy my age that lived across the street from my grandparents. Timmy Ragsdale was my first memorable crush. The three of us, Dee (my brother), Timmy and I would play Star Wars which basically entailed calling out our chosen character and shouting a few choice lines depicting battle scenes while swinging wildly on the play set in the backyard. Dee was always Han Solo, I was, of course, Princess Leia, and Timmy would play the role of Luke Skywalker.

*Note – This was before the 1980 release of the Empire Strikes Back in which we discover that Luke and Leia are actually twins. What a twist! We were sure that in Star Wars that they were destined for each other?

One beautiful spring day, fate smiled on my innocent and sweet interest in this boy My siblings were sick so Timmy and I were sent over to my grandparent’s house to play...alone in the backyard.

Grandpa was quite the gardener and maintained a decent sized vegetable garden along with peach trees, a plum tree, and boysenberry bushes that mingled with the fragrant mint leaves. But the best part of the backyard was the tall rope swing attached to the giant oat tree. I spent many hours gliding back and forth on that swing. I learned to count to ten and then to ten again in Spanish while on that swing.

And it was here, on that swing, that I received my first kiss.

“What would you do if I kissed you right now?” Timmy asked with a mischievous edge to his voice.

I tried not to smile. I couldn’t let him know this was exactly what I wanted. “I would run away, fast!” I blurted out not wanting to be discovered.

And then I had to think. Would I really run? Of course I would. My mom had taught me that kissing was very bad and that I should not be thinking of such things. I was only six. What if she found out I had actually done it? What if she didn’t? Could I live with the guilt?

I sat quietly on the wooden plank seat of the swing digging my toe into the dirt of the worn path directly beneath me. My arms wrapped around the ropes, fingers locked together and full of tension.

Would Timmy Ragsdale really try to kiss me?

And then he was there, a gentle kiss placed on my burning red cheek. I didn’t move, I couldn’t breathe.

“You didn’t run,” he taunted as he pulled away.

He was right. What could I say? It had been as though time stopped and only he had the power to move through it.

And so, with a smile I did the only thing I could and pushed back launching the swing into the air, my hair blowing in the peach blossom sweetened breeze.

In that moment, a little piece of my emotional brain was forever imprinted with the memory of a little boy from the neighborhood, my first kiss.