Summer Nostalgia

I haven't written in a very long time. I'm not proving to be very good at this whole blog thing...

I'm sitting in a friend's apartment in Muncie, Indiana and the windows are open and there's an amazing breeze ruffling the make-shift, navy bed sheet curtains. Outside, it looks like what would be a stiflingly hot and humid day at home in Texas, but here it's the type of day that makes you want to go for a walk or lay in the grass.
To top it off, I just heard "Do your ears hang low?" warbling from an ice cream truck making its rounds through the apartment complex. I can't even remember the last time I heard an ice cream truck. I think the ice cream men might have forgotten about my neighborhood.

Anyway, the ice cream truck made me think of a poem I wrote for a class in my last semester at Saint Mary's. It's what my professor likes to call a "shitty first draft," but it evokes summertime and ice cream so it can't be all bad, right?

Summer Ice Cream

Nine years old.
A long-legged girl
runs after a bobbing white van
plastered with paper ice cream treats,
churning out fairy tales and nursery rhymes.
She pants down the street,
her bare feet flapping down the blistering pavement.
waving two dollars above her head.
Finally, the van stops
for Jason and Kimberly on the next corner.
She catches up, only
to labor over her decision.
This is her first ice cream truck ice cream
and the dessert must be worthy of the occasion—
drumstick, fudgesicle or rocketpop?
Finally, she points to the
dark chocolate bar above the window.
Two dollars.
It was worth the run, and she tears
away the waxy white paper and licks
the already melting chocolate running
down her fingers and mixing with
summer salt and dirt.