Wouldn't it be Nice

Wouldn’t It Be Nice  (The Beachboys)

 It must have been June, when local berries tasted like summer sun. The Strawberry Social was in a church basement, just over the hill from our house, at the edge of the village. Brown brick. White wooden sign, engraved black lettering. ‘Evangelical United Brethren’. We called them E.U.B.’s. I sat with my parents and sisters in a pew in the dim church waiting for someone to take our tickets and call us downstairs. The nuns had warned us about Protestant churches. We were allowed for a special occasion as long as we didn’t participate, pray with the E.U.B.s. I looked around…no statues, no stained glass, no lingering scent of incense or candle wax. I thought about the boy I loved, a bad-assed Mennonite with a happy heart. I thought about taut summer-tanned skin, blue eyes beneath blond eyebrows. He was careless with all he loved, except his cows. He never failed those girls, loved them without reserve. My cautious Catholic heart knew that he was not good husband material. But we danced that summer away, sang along to The Beachboys –– wouldn’t it be nice ––He was a reckless boy, eventually stole his best friend’s wife, and died young –– drowned, doing daredevil stunts in the sea off southern Australia. Our numbers were called, we descended the stairs, sat on cool steel chairs at a long narrow table, ate strawberries and ice cream with the Protestants.

Lynda Wilde is a Canadian writer/photographer living between the cities of Kingston, Ontario, Canada, and Oaxaca de Juárez, Mexico. Her poetry has been published  in Willawa Journal, El Portal (UE New Mex), SAR (San Antonio Review), DASH (USCF),  Filling Station, Freefall,  and her prose in Guernica Edition’s 2022 Anthology of Canadian Flash Fiction Writers, ‘This Will Only Take a Minute.”