The audio version of this story is available on my MakerTube.
Dear Little Emily,
You’re about to finish elementary school, and Mum will help you throw the biggest most amazing party you’ve ever been to. You’re going to invite all of the grade sixes and sevens!! Rad! You’re going to spend a month choosing the absolute coolest music, and the coolest foods and drinks, and you’ll decorate like your life depends on it, because, well… you’re about to go to high school and you really feel like it does!
It’ll be a gorgeously hot summer afternoon at the end of June, and the cedar tree will be casting shade on the home-milled cedar siding that almost covers the green and white metal of the trailer you live in with Mum, Pappa, and your little brother, Adrian. Mum and Pappa found a sign that says “Phantom Rickshaw” and hung it on the front of the trailer, as a joke but also a token of pride, I think, that you live in this converted double-wide. At eleven years old, you don’t share their enthusiasm, and are starting to feel slightly ashamed of your home, but still going to make the best of it for this party! Even though Adrian is there. And he’s little. Mum says he is welcome to attend your party because it’s his home too. Blah. Mum says also that he’ll always be your best friend, which at the coolest-party-of-your-life seems hard to believe of your little brother who just turned eight, but at least your friends think he’s adorable.
You’ll set up the boxy silver ghetto-blaster between ferns on the bank under your bedroom window, its cable plugged into an orange extension cord that coils up the skinny peach tree and into your bedroom, where it’s plugged in right beside your bed. Mum will bring out the beautiful shiny-plastic salad bowl of pinky orange punch with ice cubes, and place it between a haphazard collection of cups and plastic camping glasses, on the table on the lawn. You’ll have desperately begged her to buy plastic cups, but she’ll have refused, saying it’s a waste of money, when we have enough cups and glasses, already. Still. The table she sets for your party will look amazing, all covered with bags of chips and crackers and cheeses. Real marbled cheddar cheese that you’ll be proud of, because you know the Dutch cheeses you normally eat wouldn’t impress your classmates.
You’ll hang crepe paper streamers in the yard, and blow up balloons until your chest hurts. Twice. You’ll put on your best outfit, trying hopelessly to emulate Cyndi Lauper, and Mum will even let you paint your eyes with blue face-paint. Nobody will know it’s not real makeup!
The classmates will arrive to the not-actually-blasting sounds of Madonna tumbling down the fern-covered bank onto the lawn, where kids will all just start eating and dancing, like they’ve done this a million times before! Like parties like this are what the world is made of. Adrian will be munching on chips, and sitting on the bank observing your party. You like to imagine he looks up to you and your friends. Not everything will be perfect, of course; you’ll have a little moment of quietly singing “It’s my party, I can cry if I want to!” because the love of your eleven-year-old-life is dancing with somebody else, and one of the older kids will wash her hands in the punch. You’ll think that’s hilarious, much to the annoyance of Mum, who will seem to take it as a sign that the party is getting out of control.
But in the end, there you’ll be, deep into the evening dark, curled up in sleeping bags on the quiet lawn with your best friends and Adrian. The stars will move their slow arc just over the silhouette of firs, hemlocks and cedars that fringes the yard. And you’ll feel wonderful.
I guess you’re going to carry that feeling forward a few decades, because in your adulthood you’ll bring it back for your community. I’m happy to say, little Emily, that after high school, after moving away to Europe, and after coming back to Canada, but just to live in the city, you and your partner will one day move back into that magical Phantom Rickshaw trailer, and raise your children there. And somehow the land, the lawn, the ferns and trees, and the community that held you, growing up, will embrace you, as if they say, “Welcome home, little Emily! We’ve been waiting for you!”
Your kids will make their own friends, and bring them home to play at the Phantom Rickshaw, oblivious to the home-milled siding and the sign above the door. You’ll grow food and flowers, and probably embarrass your children by having too much Dutch cheese in the house, and refusing to buy plastic cups. But the idea that the Phantom Rickshaw’s siding was hiding a shameful secret will evaporate when your partner replaces all those metal-clad walls, and the only thing remaining of the trailer will be the hitch poking out into the garden. Your kids will grow up proud of living in this place! And through their eyes, you’ll discover the importance of celebrating it. You’ll create the Rickshaw Masquerade.
Well… not only you. By this time, Mum and Pappa will be living in a new house just up the hill, and Adrian, no longer smaller than you, and generally seen as the life of every party, will have moved back to this community, too. And all of you will make a party that is so epic it will even once be written about in a magazine! It’s not a news-worthy rager, nor anything particularly unique. It’s probably the same kind of community gathering held in communities all over the world, sometimes connected to religious festivals; sometimes to births, deaths, or other community events. It’s the kind of party where everyone brings some food and just shares a piece of space and time, together, glad that we have the ability to do so. It’s just home.
The Rickshaw Masquerade is when we dress up for pure fun, but also to put on the colours of our best, most fabulous selves! Adrian and his friends usually build a spectacular bar, and I, middle-aged Emily, decorate the yard with banners, bells, flowers, and whatever else I can get my hands on. Mum still makes a big delicious punch, but much less sugary than that hands-washing punch at your grade-six party! Our gorgeously-dressed community arrives just before dinnertime, and we have a spiral dance on the lawn, and sing a song our family wrote for the occasion. The kids tend the bar and play badminton; the teens hide in the ferns thinking their parents cannot imagine the stealthy things they get up to. Their parents are doing these stealthy things by the fire. And we sit around the fire chatting and singing into the night.
In the morning we awake to the dry summer grass under our feet. Flowers, feathers and reusable cups are scattered around the yard, and in the blissful warm quiet, the rumble of Pappa’s tractor comes to lift up the bar and take it away for another year. And as we walk around tidying, our hearts are still singing:
Let the Sun keep burning,
and the Earth keep turning;
holding hands,
we will dance,
into the moonlight.
Let the green earth feed us
and cool water relieve us,
singing free,
joyfully,
into the moonlight.
We’ll sing it again, next year. Parties like this are what the world is made of.
Love, Emily