"Let's jump into this leaf pile!" enthuses six-year-old Karla as we're walking to LaMonte School.
"Un-un," I whisper shaking my head no as she takes two steps and leaps off the Thompson Avenue curb into a raked stack of reds, yellows, and browns.
"Come on, it's fun," she laughs, tossing up dried leaves that flutter down around her. "On your mark, get set...."
"Go!" I shout unable to resist her starting line command.
A muffled squeak echoes up from the fronds under my feet and we both freeze.
"Oh no, maybe it's a cat!" she cries scooping away leaves from around my legs.
"Fuck," I moan mimicking my father and joining her frantic raking as the brittle bracts settle right back down around my PF Flyers.
"We'd better go," she cautions trying to pull me away from the pile. "You can't be late to kindergarten."
"No!" I resist because I really, really, really want a cat.
"You can find it on your way home."
The walk to LaMonte School from our house on Hanken Road was only a half mile, but the zigzag passage through strange neighborhoods seemed daunting. I was afraid to walk it alone despite assurances from my mother and older siblings that it was safe. Sixth-grader Bobby and fourth-grader Kathy called me a big baby, but Karla agreed to go with me the whole way there. She showed me every shortcut - across the Codrington Park ball fields, along a narrow foot path through a weedy lot, and behind the next house out onto LaMonte Avenue. I'd follow this route to and from school every weekday for the next seven years except when occasionally diverted by a new friend who lived to one side or the other of my preferred path.
Kindergarten lasted a half day then, so I'd be on my own on the way home. All that fall day I'd imagined the big red cat I'd rescue from that leaf pile. When the noon bell finally rang I ran out the door and, retracing the morning route, arrived at the mound to find a group of mothers gathered around.
"It's alive!" screams an older woman backing away. "I'll go get Detective Cozza."
"Stay back," cautions another lady with a hand on my chest. "It might be poisonous."
Soon the plain-clothed policeman strides across Grove Avenue, glances at the snake stretched out along the curb, and takes control.
"Everybody away!" he commands, pulling a small pistol from a hip holster. "It's a copperhead."
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