Summer
Posted on June 19, 2008
Filed Under kids, parenting, suburban joys, thanks, summer, memory |
G is conducting a countdown. Since the beginning of the week she has been reminding me of the minutes left in the dwindling school year. Each morning over breakfast cereal or an Eggo waffle she declares that, “Today is Monday and that means there are only five more days. How many minutes is that, Mom?” And the following morning it is Tuesday and she blurts out over breakfast, “Just four more days. How many minutes is that, Mom?” And now it is Thursday and she’s experiencing the thrill and adrenaline of someone immersed in a 48 hour vigil. Just two more days until she attains the blissful freedom of Summer which means God knows what to her six year old mind. And I’ll I can think to say is, “Then what?”
It’s not that I can’t remember the sort of lazy, free-form tangle of Summer, it’s just that I’m sure I’ve glorified those two halcyon months of childhood each year, because they couldn’t have been anywhere near as good as I remember them. My brothers and I, as children, never went to sleep-away camp or to the country club pool or took sailing lessons at the yacht club. There were no organized golf or tennis lessons and the there may have been only five days of the entire break when we even attended any structured day camp, it was an Audubon sanctioned program and we ran around in the forest, loosely supervised while capturing snakes and racing bull frogs and rolling in poison ivy. We learned the names of wild flowers, Queen Anne’s Lace and Purple Loose Strife. We earned our Audubon stripes by enduring the week-end MudWalk which was a swamp slog, waist deep in decomposing muck. It was all about emotional endurance, withstanding the indignity of leaches and mosquitoes and pockets of quicksand that captured your shoes and sucked at your shins.
The most one could hope for during this two hour trek was to avoid the urge to cry. (Jessie Allen broke down half way through the walk each year, providing the rest of us with the ammunition to make her next 11 months a living hell. In her defense, I still cannot watch a movie with American soldiers traipsing through the swamps of Vietnam holding their guns over their heads without thinking about that Mudwalk and Jessie Allen and the effort it took for ALL of us not to succumb to tears.)
Though we had a pool in the backyard, we were forced to take swimming lessons at the Town Pond which was really just a man made hole filled with startlingly green water, heavy with algae, stinking in the heat of August. The pond never warmed and there were pockets of still cold, deep in the middle, where the bottom was obscured by algae growth so thick you could feel it between your toes. We shared rumors about the various atrocities purported to lie on the bottom - dead horses, abandoned cars, the ghost of Minerva Graf who supposedly drowned a decade earlier while her mother bonked the life guard. As part of the Junior Water Rescue course we were made to swim the length of the pond and back, the whole time stroking for our lives, maintaining a speed we hoped would out-pace that of Minerva, up from the deep, surely intent on claiming a pre-teen companion.
In the evenings we played a loosely organized game we called Chase which involved a lot of hiding and running and suppressing the urge to wet your pants. Chase was best played after dusk when the fear of dark shadows and neighborhood dogs made regular old hide and seek a singular thrill. We were barefoot, we were dirty, we were probably put to bed that way each night leaving the happy smear of summer on our pillowcases.
I wish, for my children, these idealized memories of summer, memories full of taste and sound and smell sensation, singularly unique, familiar yet fabled, the sting of mosquitoes around the ankles while picking strawberries from the field, the smell of damp bathing suits and towels in a heap on the bathroom floor, the taste of salt surf on the tongue and the disappointment that is the last half of sandwich stolen by a shrieking sea gull, dinners eaten on the screened porch listening to the peculiar call of the Whipperwill just beyond the whir and pass of the lawn sprinklers at dusk, the drip of ice cream down the wrists on humid nights in August, the rush of wind while biking fast, down hill, with no hands, “the conscious yet not resentful sensation of being caught up in a web of something as tangible and fragile as thread.”
Eight weeks, 56 days, 1324 hours, 79,440 minutes of summer still to go, but who’s counting?
Quote from John Cheever’s The Day the Pig Fell Into the Well
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