My favorite game when I was growing up was spotlight.  There is just something unexplainable about the summer nights I spent chasing my cousins around our yard in pitch darkness, trying my best to search for flip-flops poking out from behind bushes or the glint of jewelry in the rays of my flashlight.

Our favorite place to play was at my aunt’s in Poca, WV.  Miles away from big city lights, the yard behind her house became our fantasy nightmare world of shadows, reaching tree limbs, and mysterious noises.  In the beginning, when I was it, my cousins would choose strategic hiding places and torture me with spooky groans and wails.  Little did they know that even as a youngster, I had sensitive hearing and a good sense for where the sounds were coming from.  After a few times of getting caught, they quickly stopped their taunting and sat in desperate silence.

When I finally had the chance to hide, I was probably the biggest cheater.  I would scramble up a nearby tree and sit in silence on the highest branch that would hold my weight.  After a while, though, my cousins got wise and started searching high for my scrawny silhouette perching on the branch of an elm somewhere.

I remember one year, during the fourth of July, our summer night spotlight was made even more magical by distant sparks of the fireworks my uncle was setting off in the front yard.  After a few minutes of searching with the flashlight, I turned it off and watched the dark back yard until a bright flash from the air lit up and I could just see my cousin Jamie’s sandaled feet behind one of the bushes.  Without turning on my flashlight, I ran in the direction of her hiding place.  Another flash lit up the yard and I could see her preparing to run.  The yard went dark again and I ran as fast as I could, reaching my arms out until another flash of light exploded in the sky and I felt my hand barely touch her back.

“You’re it!”

I know I made this all sound so melodramatic, but I don’t think I write enough about some of the positive memories I have of my family, especially my cousins.  And, as I have said before, childhood has some sort of magic to it that we don’t really notice until we outgrow it and look back on it with longing. 

Most of the time, when I bring these memories up to any of my cousins, they smile and say, “Um, I guess…  I don’t really remember.”  They do remember that I was a spoiled child who whined a lot when things didn’t go my way.

But, like me, they remember that there were good times, games we played together, where for a brief amount of time we were all getting along.  In my memory, spotlight was one of those games that kept us busy for a while, that brought us together long enough to get along and remember that we were family.