Mohawk
Noel Laflin
8-24-22
It was on the steep and narrow trail up to Mohawk, some fifty summers ago, where sweaty teens and young men slightly older struggled with heavy, floppy, dusty, pee-stained mattresses and rusty, uncooperative metal sleeping cots (springs snagging shirts on those still wearing them and pinching fingers indiscriminately), when Freddie yodeled out to me from high above, 'Noeleo, Noeleo, Noeleo!', Where for art thou Noeleo?,' suddenly and quite unexpectedly giving me a new and foreign sounding name; a name that caught the fancy of others that began to both gleefully and unabashedly chant it down the trail where I struggled with my own beast of a bed entrapped in buck brush.
The cot suddenly burst free from its entanglement, but the name stuck, and I smiled as I, too, trudged up the Mohawk Trail, fully intending on giving Freddie hell once I finally made it to the top of the ridge, but ended up grinning and laughing instead once I eventually did so.
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