Our backyard fort once overlooked the two rows of squat pines like a mountaintop outpost. The trees now hold the sentinel positions, towering shoulder-to-shoulder at the edge of the cornfield.
    It’s not hard to accept the absence of the fort itself: My two younger brothers and I tore it apart ourselves years ago as a chore one summer when I was home from college. A black, rolling June storm had finally knocked out the last of the fort’s supporting stilts, and it had fallen to the ground, where it sat crookedly atop the railroad ties and two-by-tens that had once braced it against the sky. It took the three of us just a few afternoon hours to finish the job, prying apart walls, roof and floor with claw hammers, weakening boards with strokes of the saw and hammering down the exposed nail points.
    So I’ve long since grown used to not seeing the fort from across the cornfield when I’m almost home. What’s still inconceivable to me are those pine trees along the low hill at the back edge of the yard. We used to get in trouble for sledding over them in the winter, they used to be so small and fragile. I had planted them when I was nine, with Dad. Thirty-three of them, which I remember because the week after we did, we had an Indian Guides meeting, and when my turn came to tell the other guys and their dads something I did since the last meeting, that’s what I told them: “I helped my dad plant thirty-three trees.”
    The trees were barely saplings when Dad brought them home. Twigs, really, with a tiny bundle of damp roots and soil gathered up with a patch of burlap and a snip of string.
     I look at them these days and wonder how could I possibly have planted trees that are nearly thirty feet high, trunks maybe nine, ten inches thick. The tallest of them stand right in front of the spot where the fort used to be. If it was still there, the dense, needled branches would be snug against the front wall, pushing in on the hinged square of wood that was our window to the east.
    Awhile ago, before I moved back to Ohio, I went walking back there, and I could still discern the rectangular patch of ground that had been beneath the fort. The dirt there was a little more reluctant to grant growth to the clover and scrub weeds that grew in the strip of our property between the trees and the cornfield. I think probably it was because the soil there was more densely packed from summer after summer of our sneakered feet trampling it while we built the fort, camped out, and spent afternoons there in the still heat, listening to insects hum beneath the music from the dirty, battery-powered radio we’d bring back every so often.
    I looked to see if there was anything left. A dried, rotten scrap of carpet; a bent nail; the plastic battery cover from the light we had hanging on one wall of the fort.
    But I found nothing. My brothers and I had done a good job cleaning up.
    Across the cornfield is a treeline I have permanently etched in memory. It’s grown, like the pines, but it still holds a shape like a sphinx staring south.
    We used to look for arrowheads in the tilled soil. Never found any, but we used to keep the gray and black pieces of flint that looked like they’d been pinched from clay and fired to glossiness.
    That afternoon visit, though, I did find a piece of dirty, pale greenish glass. Coke bottle glass, judging by the rounded ribs along one side. We drank a lot of Coke those summers. More than once, we broke the bottles with rocks from the field.
    I thought about that piece of glass. Began to wonder.
    The summer that Rick and I built the fort at the edge of the cornfield, I met Lisa. I was 13 or 14, I think. She was a year older, friends with my neighbor Amy, lived about two miles away and went to a different school than we did.
    Once that summer, Rick and I rode our bikes down to Lisa’s house and the three of us then wandered over to a bridge nearby. It spanned a stream much bigger than the creek near our neighborhood, but one probably not significant enough to be called a river.
    Despite its short length, it was a true bridge: a pair of rough arches reaching to the other side, I-Beams painted silver, blistering with rust bubbles, seamed with rivets like knuckles. Beneath, there was a flat, sandy shore dotted with rocks, and the wide, slow water slipping by with puckers and whorls hinting at mystery hidden in its muddy flow.
    Rick and I had actually once explored part of the river much further upstream, parking our bikes at the edge of someone’s yard and making our way through the trees to the water’s edge. We clung to shore and pushed deeper into the woods and fields until there was no more shore to be walked on, and the stream drew right up to the barbed-wire fence of a cow pasture.
    Lisa and Rick and I scrambled down the embankment to the shadows underneath and threw rocks in the stream. We crossed halfway on slippery stones, and hopped back to safety when we could go no farther. We crawled up to the musty, spiderwebbed underbelly of the road, listened to an occasional car roll by like quick thunder, and hung from the girders, daring each other to cross the stream monkey-style, dangling from the bridge.
    That may have been the only time I’ve been there, unless Rick and I went back again another day when the sun rose on boredom and summer wanderlust.
    One of my daughter’s friends lives down that way now, and sometimes when we drive over the bridge I try to see the ghosts of three kids underneath, and then I flick my eyes across the street to the house with the mailbox that no longer bears a familiar name.
    Anyway, according to Amy, Lisa thought I was – and I remember the exact cadence and pitch of her voice as she shared this secret with me one afternoon by my mailbox – “really cute.”
    In junior high, I had ditched my thick glasses for contact lenses and was combing my hair differently, but this was still the first time anybody’d called me cute. I latched onto those words and held them in my ears at night when the summer voices of crickets and bullfrogs drifted in through my bedroom window. I’d try to imagine Lisa saying them to Amy with a shy, confiding giggle.
    After supper one night, Rick and I were sweating in the late sun, working on the elevated floor of our fort – the humble beginnings. We had open bottles of Coke sitting next to the box of nails.
    Amy and Lisa came walking up the hill, but I saw only Lisa. The summer sun had left pieces of itself in her blond hair, brightening it in faint streaks, and she was wearing a loose blue shirt that exposed her belly button when she put her hands on her hips. Summer and Coke pumped a double shot of possibility and caffeine through my blood as she squinted her eyes against the late afternoon sky, looked up at me and said hi.
    The four of us wound up riding our bikes to the Friendly’s in North Canton. We took the back way, a couple miles through the housing developments to stay off the busy streets as long as we could. Besides, riding the back way let us ride side-by-side. And when cars did go by, I tried hard to slow down gallantly and let Lisa go in front of me. Her shirt would blow lightly in the breeze as she leaned over the handlebars and I could almost – oh-so-damn-almost – see up there.
    At Friendly’s, we leaned the bikes against a wall, bought ice cream cones and parked ourselves on the curb, summer’s breath in full rush as the sun began to fall and lightning bugs began to flick yellow over the grassy lawn behind the restaurant.
    None of us felt like riding all the way back home, so Amy called her dad Pete, to ask him to come get us in his pickup truck.
   It was getting dark by the time he showed up.
    Following the truck, though, was a 1934 Ford belonging to Rick’s parents. And a red classic roadster driven by another neighbor. And my family’s van.
    Half the neighborhood had come out for ice cream, unable to resist summer’s call.
    We hung out for another hour or so as everyone got ice cream and sat on the curb or leaned on the nearby fence, and the stars came out, bugs sang, and the occasional bat fluttered high against the sky.
    The pavement was still warm from a day of baking, but the air had a light chill to it by the time Rick and I finally lifted the bikes into the back of the truck. The four of us sat shoulder-to-shoulder on the ride home, hunched up not against the cab, but in the breeze near the tailgate, watching the sky and the red glow of the taillights. Lisa leaned close, put her head on my shoulder, and I could smell the hot grass of fields in her hair.
    It was summer, after all.