Summer. I love it and hate it. There was a time when I
couldn’t wait for the days of long light and no responsibility. Long gone are
the freedoms of childhood, but maybe one day I can retire and discover some of
them again. I remember one summer as a child I determined if I got out of bed
by opening my eyes and looking up and out the window. If the sky was a robin’s egg blue against the
green of the pecan tree I would spring out of bed to absorb the day. If the blue was off a bit or I saw clouds in the
way I would roll over to the cool side of the sheets and sleep some more. My laziness was the product of having both
parents at work and two grandmothers who were busy enough they didn’t miss one
less child making a mess in the kitchen.
I lived outdoors in the summer primarily because we didn’t
have air conditioning and outside was cooler than inside. Plus, our Rawls Avenue yard was a virtual
summer oasis. Our house sat on two lots so our yard was wide and deep and
almost completed shaded by several large trees strategically placed by the
Almighty. There had been a huge oak tree outside the back door and the space
between the roots of the tree was my playhouse. There was one niche that was my
perfect size and it was my car I drove to all points on the globe I knew
existed, which at that time was only about a five-mile radius. Hurricane
Camille took it and more out in 1969, but despite losing the canopy of the oak
we still had enough to protect us from the blistering heat of South
Mississippi.
In my mind’s eye the yard was divided into distinct sections.
The immediate back yard began with the back steps encompassing Daddy’s shed and
Mama’s monkey grass garden and ended at the clothesline (we didn’t have a
dryer, either) just behind the pecan tree. This part of the yard was more utilitarian,
so there wasn’t much playing there. The cats, or whatever animal we had at the
time, ate on a small bricked area so it was always littered with old pie plates
in various stages of rust. The rest of this yard was too shady for grass to
grow and stayed covered with mulberry tree droppings, which was fine if you
didn’t mind having purple feet (who wore shoes?).
Behind the clothesline was a fig tree carpeted with wild,
pink oxalis. As I side-note I once watched the Middle-Child cook a bunch of the
clover-shaped leaves and eat them. I later learned she did it to put off the
advances of a young suitor. At the time, I thought she was a genius with
survivor skills when actually it’s a miracle she didn’t poison herself. Beyond
the fig tree was a jungle of bamboo and wisteria vines bordered finally by a mysterious,
low stone wall. On the other side of the wall was the remnants of an old road
or alley. If I could time travel I would go back to see just what it all looked
like before the Csazar family called it home. Oh! Maybe the stones are a time
portal! I digress, again.
A towering magnolia divided the two lots and on the other side,
was the bonus back yard. At the back, on the house side of the walled jungle,
there were relics of what have might have once been a garden. It’s here my imagination
wandered when my daddy would tell me bedtime stories about fairies and gnomes
and the one about the grasshopper and the ants. My daddy was a master
story-teller. In line with the magnolia was a Catawba tree covered with caterpillars
my Uncle Walter loved for fishing. Further up were plum, wild cherry, and
Japanese magnolia trees, and in between was the only area where the sun would shine
the most. This was the site of home movies, a pet cemetery and Daddy’s prized satsuma
tree. In the summer months, the yard
bloomed with well-oiled teenage girls in bikinis working on tans they didn’t
need because of their natural Mediterranean skin. And it was fine for them to
be so scantily clothed because they were safely protected from the wandering eyes
of the neighbor boys by a ring of overgrown azalea bushes and other shrubbery
my father refused to trim. Head slap! At last, I understand you, Daddy!
The front yard was for socializing. It started with the front
steps and was enclosed by a pipe fence useful for sitting and talking with
friends and neighbors, or practicing acrobatics and tight-rope walking. It’s
where the girls of the house held court and broke hearts or had them broken. It’s where one could go and sit and think and
dream in the cool shade on long, hot summer days.
Yes, a child like me could get lost in a yard like we had.
So many nooks and crannies to hide in away from a mother and grandmothers who
wanted you to do chores and siblings who mostly ignored you anyway because of
the age gap. But I wasn’t always
ignored. There were those summers my closest brother used to play with me
before he realized it wasn’t cool to have your baby sister hanging around. My
favorite was the summer of the Lawnmower.
It was an old lawn mower, part of Daddy’s hoard, with no engine or
blades but perfectly working wheels. I
would sit on the hole and my brother would push me around the neighborhood and
up and down the Hills in the empty wooded lot across the street. I could write a whole book on the wonders and
joys of that lot, so I’ll just leave it for now. Did he pull me in the
lawnmower behind his bicycle? I don’t remember but I’ll just say yes because it
was exciting to me either way. Then
there was the summer he (we) collected cans.
This is before cans were made of aluminum so collecting wasn’t for recycling.
He (we) collected cans just for the joy of having a collection of as many
different cans as he (we) could find. That summer I learned there were a lot of
different beers in the world.
Eventually, I outgrew the desire of wanting to be outside coincidentally about the same time my mother installed an air conditioner and cable in the
living room. Suddenly being cool in front of the television with more than two
channels was much more inviting than the heat and bug bites of the outdoors. If
I needed to get away I would go as far as the swing on the screened front porch
and lose track of time to the rhythm of the squeak and clang of the chains as
the swing rocked to and fro. Again, I
could write a whole book on the joys of that front porch so I’ll leave it here
only to mention there was nothing more magical to me than that front porch on a
moonlit summer night. To this day I dream of it in my sleep and waking hours.
When I began my responsible life of job, wife, and mother I
lost summer in the jumble of every other season. The years to me were just hot and cold, and I
loathed the hot part. Last year I began
a campaign to reclaim summer. I force
myself to sit outside to eat lunch on workdays and walking for exercise after
work even when the temperature holds strong in the ‘90s with high humidity. On weekends,
I make myself do something outside even it’s just sitting in the shade on the porch
and reading, or like today, writing. By forcing
myself to do these things I’m learning to live with the heat and embrace summer
again. I said live with it, not love it.
Maybe my love will grow again when I don’t have to measure my days between weekends and holidays, and I can decide to get out of bed by the color of the sky. Until then, at
least I’m trying.
