Every evening for what seems like years, Katy and I could be found in the back yard, playing as the groggy afternoons went dark. Our tools were our feet and sticks and flowers and our rusty, half-broken jungle gym that lurched violently with every movement. And the garage door behind which we found old broken materials for building worlds.
We were the princesses of the fig tree, the orange tree, the tangerine tree, the radioactive lemon tree that made mutant-huge lemons that conferred special powers. We owned the driveway, the basketball hoop, the concrete porch, the area behind the garage where all the graves of our past pets were. We were the celestial soldiers, the sailor scouts, the gem warriors of that back yard, and of the world. I was Sapphire from Saturn and she was Garnet from Pluto, and we had elemental powers. I could toss fireballs and set things alight, and Katy could conjure up waves and tsunamis. We had to train to fight the bad guys at a special training camp called Rachel.
We had tactics class, which involved attacking the recycling bins from different angles. We had sharpshooter class, where we threw rocks at the telephone wires above us. We had archery training, where we whittled arrows from fig tree branches. We had endurance class where we ran for miles and miles and lifted hundreds of pounds. For waltzing class, we plucked off all the flowers that looked like little dancing ballarinas and put them in our stringy, tangled hair. We attended court celebrations and navigated complex political situations, negotiated border decisions and enforced them; we defended villages from raiders.
If we fought bravely and defeated the enemies and suppressed the coup d’etats and won the boys’ hearts, we were anointed the Neo-Queens of the Universe and sipped the blood of our enemies (cranberry juice) on top of the monkey bars, surveying our kingdom. This only happened once, though. The game was in the struggle, not in the victory. Very often, however, we were rewarded with holy Cheez-its.