Our father, in a rare gesture toward sport, nailed a basketball hoop to the huge cottonwood tree in the back south acre of our yard. It was 1957; I was six. Soon grass was trampled, the earth flattened, hardened, by the high school basketball team my brother was a member of. The boys balanced and then nailed a board on a fallen tree trunk near the court, used it to throw their shirts and towels on, used it for the giant jug of water my mother would carry out to them, and for the glasses to drink from—I carried those, wrapped in dish towels in a sack. Usually I wore a green shirt and a pleated white skirt in honor of their school colors. Ten years younger, I imagined myself their beloved mascot, saw my role as essential.

How could basketball not be my favorite sport? There were no organized sports for girls, and how peacefully, ignorantly, we seemed to accept that. My brothers left for universities, I would walk the path through the backyard to the hoop, play HORSE by myself or against any of the nine kids who lived on my dead end street. I swam, I biked, and then, in high school, suddenly synchronized swimming for girls, and I remember the endless practices after school—our movements choreographed to I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date, no time to say hello goodby I’m late I’m late I’m late---we would leap from the sides of the pool, dressed as a deck of cards, our movements in the water fast and incisive. The song was an insane choice, of course. The lyrics speeded up, manic, female in a crazed way for girls just getting used to having their periods but we made no protest as we kicked into the air, formed a flower, petals opening one by one--- yes, it all seems perverse now, but as our only choice we took it on with a kind of enthusiasm that thrilled our high school gym teacher.

The cottonwood tree and the hoop do not carry the whole story of my ragged family, or the stories of the original team of boys, or the whole story of the little mascot, cheering on the sidelines. The hoop rose higher and higher—our shots were extreme, remarkable, hoisted sky-level, branch-level, made buckets fewer and fewer. Basketball was the only sport that mattered, really, and that is still the truth. When our father was fired we sold first the south acre, then the north, to pay the bills. The cottonwood, the high hoop, not ours anymore. In memory, it ascends.

Deborah Keenan is the author of ten collections of poetry, and a book of writing ideas, from tiger to prayer. She taught in the MFA program at Hamline University for thirty years, and now teaches privately and at The Loft.  Her two new manuscripts are The Saint of Everything and John Brandon’s Sentences. She lives in beautiful, mysterious St. Paul, and has been heard to say: hoops are my life.