True Ancestor: You a lie, you a lie, you got boogers in yo' eye, you had 44 babies on the 4th of July

That was a little playground taunt that I remember from my old neighborhood.

I associate it with weather just like this: hot and humid. The chlorophyll, jaw-ache smell of cut grass, and the glitter of broken glass settling into the melting asphalt as if set there by some cynical cosmic jeweler. The indolence-inducing, end-of-school-year smell.

Weather like this is remembering weather, end-of-school weather.

I remember how after recess, my hands would smell like iron from the sun-heated monkey bars, and how my shirt would stick to my back and the sweat would cool me off. The windows in the clasrooms opened in, and you could get whiffs of that clorophyll jaw-ache smell and watch robins hopping by, little question marks seeming to hover above their heads as they peered in at us, or simply stared at their own reflections.

I remember how relieved Mrs. Osborne was when the bell for recess would ring, and how sad when it rang again to signal our return. We'd come back in, dirty and sweaty and depressed at the prospect of more school, and she'd be at her desk, her feet up, disappointed to see us, savoring a Mr. Goodbar. We had until she finished that candy bar to get our ya-ya's out and get back behind our desks. Then it was back to business -- and she meant business, Mrs. Osborne did.

And we'd all smell the end of the school year coming, and we'd all strain toward it like salmon swimming upstream.

You watched dandelions seeds float by on their parachutes and you wished you were one of them, dreamed about riding one; you looked at the big-headed girl seated in front of you, stared at her latticed ponytail, damp from sweat and humidity, and you still felt your heart vibrating your sternum, and you felt your butt starting to stick to that hard wooden seat with the metal bookshelf bracketed on underneath.

Sometimes old tunes return to me, but these old taunts were our music, and so they return, too: the playground progenitors of rap and hip-hop (and it was the black girls, not the boys; the girls, jumping rope, who were the masters of this art form). The rhymes lodged in our minds and were the metronomes for our hearts as we played and ran and gasped in the saturated air.