SUMMER CHILDHOOD

Skitch eating watermelon

THEN & NOW:

This summer has been pleasant! I am very happy and surprised to be able to say so. We've had a might too much rain for the garden's sake, but I am relieved that summer has not tortured me. For many years I have dreaded and hated the summer season. I've had jobs that left me out in the sun and heat until I was miserable, cars that had broken air conditioners, and homes that were poorly insulated. It seemed I could keep warm in the winter, but could not stay even marginally comfortable in the summer. But I do remember, there was a time when summer was synonymous with magic. I've often said that Heaven will be an eternal summer filled with eternal children, because I've never met a child that didn't understand the allure of summer, and the combination of children and summer seems a miraculous mixture. Even I know that summer was extra special when I was young. 
 

My sisters were ten and twelve years older than me. It was as though I were the only child in the second family my parents made. Therefore, many of my summer-kid memories are solitary ones. I loved riding in the back of the truck, but I usually rode in complete solitude. I remember the rush of the wind in my face and my long hair flying wildly behind me, like a banner, becoming an unruly mess that I would have to untangle with great suffering later in the day, either at our arrival at church or town or before I braided it at bedtime. My oldest sister Sandi often took the chore on herself and saved me the agony of battling with my hair.

A young boy once told me that he often saw me riding in the back of the truck, and that I looked like, “a big blonde dog riding all alone in the back of the truck with your hair flying around like that.” I never was sure if I should punch him or thank him, so I just gave him a funny look and moved on.

I didn't care if I did look like a dog! I loved those times in the back of the truck. I loved the solitude, the quiet of white noise – the sweet wind. I loved the warmth of the sun, and my thoughts became my good companions. One day, Lila and I were in the back of the truck together and Dad picked up a hitchhiker. The exceedingly annoying fellow tried again and again to make conversation with me. I didn't like him much anyway because I suspected he had dishonorable intentions in regards to my sister Lila, and I enjoyed daydreaming or singing in those usually solitary hours, so I resented his intrusion. Lila was welcome company; this chatty fellow I could do without. I felt couldn't sing with him present so I wrapped myself in a familiar daydream and tried repeatedly to ignore him. 
 

Finally, he asked, "I see you back here all the time; how do you keep from getting bugs in your mouth?" 
 

I turned my head his way and pulled my hair back from my face so that I could look him directly in the eye when I very firmly but calmly said, "I keep my big mouth shut." 
 

He looked a little shocked, and then he laughed. I turned back to the road and, at last, he took the hint and left me to my silence.

Lila still laughs when she tells the story of how her little baby sister "put that big guy in his place." 
 

When my niece Tanya, Lila's daughter, and my cousin Ramona were visiting we would put blankets in the back of the truck and lie down between them. Even on summer nights the wind was cool enough to snuggle under a blanket and stare up at the stars on our way home from church, watching the tree limbs whiz by and the stars stand still. I sometimes asked Tanya and Ramona, “What would it be like to just fly up through those night clouds into the dark, cold, starry sky? What would we find up there?” We would guess about the many wonders that could be hiding and waiting beyond the darkness, lit up by starlight. What magic that pondering was! 
 

I spent many summer hours in the great swooping swing that Daddy had hung for me. He climbed very high in a tree to hang it and it had a great reach. It was more like a low trapeze than a swing. I would practice “tricks” or listen to my little transistor radio, or swing gently while I read a good book.

On the hottest days I would make my way to a large flat rock in the heart of the woods and settle down to spend hours with a good book. The rock was cool; the woods were emerald; and the book was engaging. Summer was great.

I spent summer days helping Daddy with the horses, or the plowing, or carrying the cold spring water up to the house. Making my way through the dappled woods with two buckets or two gallon jugs full of the spring water we drank and cooked with. I could feel the specks of sunlight kiss my cheeks and arms as I walked. Running water was a luxury we did not know, and to my mother's great consternation, we shared the spring with a large frog. When she complained about a frog in the drinking water, Pop would wink at me and say, “Well, he won't drink too much.”

I did not mind the frog. I did not mind fetching water, and I loved taking care of the barn animals, and helping with the garden. Those chores I truly enjoyed. But I did not like most of the chores my mother and sister requested my help with now and then. I hated doing dishes and sweeping floors. I did not see the point in making a bed or folding a towel. I guess the only “woman's work” I enjoyed was helping Momma hang the wet clothes on the line. When I was quite young, she would say, “ready” and I would hand her the next item from the basket, fascinated by the precise way she hung each damp cloth on the line. The wringer washer had squeezed most of the water out of the clothing and my job was to shake the item out and wait until she was ready to hang it on the line. As I grew, I was allowed to hang some of the clothes myself. I would dash off to the other end of the line with a towel or a shirt while Momma hung the big awkward sheets and jeans. I tried my best to pin mine as neatly as she did hers. Once she grew sick and spent most of her time in bed, hanging clothes on the line was largely my job.

Late in the summer evenings I would sit on the porch, watch the miracle of the sunset, and feel the silver gloaming settle all around me like a damp sheet. Sometimes I would sing, "Swing low, sweet chariot," while the sun swung low on the horizon. Dad often came out and sat with me. He would read his Bible until it grew too dark. He would chew tobacco, looking up from The Good Book occasionally in deep, thoughtful silence. Once it grew too dark to read, he would talk to me about what he was studying, or about the woods and the creatures all around us. He would say , “Listen to them Da Dats! It's just thirty days 'til frost once you hear them start singing.” It would still be summer, but autumn was whispering a warning through the wind.

Summer storms were an adventurous sort of magic. When the wind picked up and the tree leaves turned over, showing their pale bellies, my mother would say, “Look at the trees, Dido. They are praying for rain and God will answer. He gives them what they need. It'll rain soon.”

The thunder would begin to roll off in the distance and Sandi, with her one short leg, would limp out to the porch with a wild and natural look behind her eyes. As our grandmother, that I'd never had the blessing to meet, had shared the storms with Sandi, my big sister would now share them with me. “Listen, Dee Dee! Hear the thunder? It's God's voice and the lightening is his sword. Grab us a quilt. The storm is coming!”

She told me what Grandmother had told her, and I would run and grab a patchwork quilt for my sissy and me. We would snuggle under it in awe as the lightening stuck and the thunder rumbled all around us. We felt safe and yet surrounded by power and danger. Sometimes the sound of the raindrops on the tin roof were too loud to speak over, but we hardly knew it. It was not a time for words. Who wants to interrupt God!?

Until she married and moved out when I was five years old and she was fifteen, Lila was my near constant companion. It was summer when she took me on a walk to a graveyard and taught me how to pray. It was summer when she took me behind some bushes to pee and taught me the good rule of “if you can see them they can see you.” It was summer when she told me about the small green man she had seen in the woods, and summer when she wrote “The Little People” a poem about fairies dancing in light bulbs, to sooth my fear of the dark.

My parents and one or both of my sisters were there every day. I was an innocent child in a world of enchanted “grown-ups”. My only child companions were occasional ones. For one wonderful summer my cousins Wendy, Wade, and P.T. were there, but usually my summers were blessed only by the visits from Tanya and Ramona. They brought me kid-company. We would play made up games with funny names like “Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and Jim” or “Wild Indians”. If we grew “peckish” (a little hungry) then we ate birch bark, and teaberry leaves, and ground cherries. If we were more than peckish we would put some yellow mustard on bread and have mustard sandwiches, or have Sandi slice up a garden tomato which we would eat with mayonnaise on biscuits left over from breakfast. At night we would pull all the couch cushions into the floor and “camp” in the living room. Usually Sandi read us a story or ten before we shuffled off to our camp sight. The crickets were so plentiful and so loud they sounded like they covered the whole house and we would attempt to “settle down” to the song they surrounded us with. My kitten “Pens” would come sneaking along in the dark and ask for attention. He would attack our eyes when we blinked, or our lips when we whispered, and wrestle with our fingers. He helped us giggle and get into trouble with Daddy and Momma. We would try to be quiet and wait until everyone was asleep then sneak up and eat cakes and drink pop when we could find them, or mustard sandwiches and water when we could not. Often we fell asleep waiting for everyone else to do so.

Now all those summers are far away, nothing but sweet memories, and I am the enchanted grown-up talking about God's voice, and The Little People, and the warnings of Da Dats. My summers have been full of working in the heat and running frantically here and there as though the world might implode if I miss just one scheduled meeting. Summer is not as magical as it once was, but every now and then, when I'm lying in the yard with my sons Cory and Will, looking up at the wonders of the starry sky I ask them, “What would it be like to just fly up through those night clouds into the dark, cold, starry sky?” and as they answer, I am reminded of the magic that is still there all around me, waiting for me to take the the time to see it.

Skitch in the summer