The soundtrack of my girlhood summers was polka music. On a vacant lot next to the Cowboy Miniature Golf course in Estes Park, Colorado, we dug ten holes in the ground and installed trampolines. All day and into the night, we played polka music over a loudspeaker—no rock music for us; it was the lively rhythms of an accordion that we blasted. It was the 60s. Although the country was in social turmoil, I innocently spent my girlhood summers at our family’s trampoline center. 

I was nine the first time I had sex.

We charged fifty cents per half hour to jump on a trampoline. My younger brother Kipper and I learned new tricks on the trampoline every summer: front flips, backflips, flips with a half twist. No helmets. No nets. No one ever got hurt. 

My older cousin groomed me over a series of summers when we’d visit my mom’s sister. It’s our secret, he’d say. 

In the mountains, it rains every afternoon. After a good twenty-minute soaking, the sun comes back out and our job was to jump on each trampoline until it was dry. When customers weren’t bouncing on the tramps, Kipper and I would crawl underneath the trampolines, looking for coins that had jettisoned out of people’s pockets. If we found a couple of nickels, we could buy a soda from the pop machine—Nehi Orange was my favorite.

One summer, my cousin suggested that we play upstairs in my room. He lowered himself and to me, and when it was over, he said, “Do you know what we just did? We just had sex.” I looked up sex in the dictionary but still didn’t understand until I was older. I never told anyone.

For years after our summers in Estes, I had two recurring dreams. One was that an ugly clown would lower himself onto me and smother me. The other was that if I took a big jump, I could fly. Polka music played in the background of both dreams.

The End