The Jump Rope

As the electricity goes out for the 4th day in a row, we start to get anxious. We cannot sleep anymore during the day to try to keep cool, but we cannot bare the heat either. I don't mind a blackout for an hour or two a day, but all day and night for four days, with the only electricity lasting about an hour out of every 12, we cannot take it anymore. Socrates comes downstairs with an old telephone cord as we sit around the kitchen table, trying to figure out what to do. He is jumping up and down, using it as a jump rope. I go in to the kitchen to talk to Ivis when we hear screaming from the drive way. And our Dominican mother is making the two boys turn the cord for her so she can jump. We go out to join her, move it into the streets in which kids that I didn't even know lived here came out of their homes to join us and our old telephone cord.