by Lana Hechtman Ayers.
Our vehicle for great adventures—a refrigerator carton rescued from the garbage pile at the curb in front of my best friend’s house. Wise and inventive Joann, five years older than me, wove myriad stories out of thin air, the way a line of robins suddenly appeared on electrical wires overhead.
The box, lying on its side, our mighty ship sailing across the windblown black seas, sailing us all the way to the North Pole. Joann, as captain, threw herself along the long sides, rocking us back and forth across her backyard’s grass. I copied her, although a few beats behind. She didn’t mind. She pointed at a brown squirrel perched atop the chain link fence, waving his bushy tail at us. “Thar she blows,” Joann said, cupping her hands around her eyes like binoculars, “The white whale!” She offered her hands to me to see for myself. A whale indeed.
Joann maneuvered the carton upright and we became astronauts in a tall spaceship capsule. She leaned into a long wall, pumping it with her feet and angled it precariously sideways. She pointed up into the robin’s egg blue sky at a plane recently taken off from nearby Idlewild airfield. “A new comet,” she pronounced. “Comet Lana!” We headed for the moon next, and upon arrival she tipped the box down for the crash landing. We traipsed the lunar surface, really just patchy grass, on the balls of our feet. Joann planted an invisible American flag to mark the landing of two girls from Queens.
The box soon became our house, tossed about in a tornado. Joann as Dorothy and I her faithful companion, Toto. Suddenly, the backyard transformed all black and white. But Joanne’s mother called out from a bedroom window, Time for supper. We never made it to Oz.
That night, Joann’s dad dragged the refrigerator carton back to the pile at the curb, and the next morning, garbage men hauled it away as if it weren’t a spaceship or a whaling ship or a Kansas prairie home.
At dinner, my mother said to me, So, the got-rocks next door have a brand-new fridge. Bet it even has an ice maker. They think they’re better than us, showing off that big box like a new Cadillac.
The fridge in our house, a twenty-year-old white Norge, had rounded corners and a handle like the lever on a bank safe, and a freezer the size of a shoe box that sadly only fit one gallon of ice cream but kept the milk nice and cold. Arctic—just the way I liked to drink it.
