SUMMER/TIME
Because we value diversity here, let me say that I respect those people who think winter is wonderful. And the brilliance of autumn leaves against a fall sky is stunning. I catch my breath every spring at the sight of greening grass and fat buds.
But I have always loved summer best.
I continue to be amazed that I have somehow found myself, by my own choice, living out my life in Winnipeg. Our Manitoba summers are lovely, but far too brief. Do you know the Robert Service verse, The Cremation of Sam McGee? Here's an excerpt:
Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee, where the cotton blooms and blows.
Why he left his home in the South to roam 'round the pole, God only knows.
He was always cold, but the land of gold seemed to hold him like a spell;
Though he'd often say in his homely way that "he'd sooner live in hell."
When Sam freezes, the poet drags the body to a wrecked vessel on Lac LeBarge, firing
up the boiler and stuffing the body in. After a bit he goes back to check on him.
And there sat Sam, looking cool and calm, in the heart of the furnace roar;
And he wore a smile you could see a mile, and he said: "Please close that door!
It's warm in here, but I greatly fear you'll let in the cold and storm--
Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it's the first time I've been warm."
Sam and I are kindred souls!
My early years were spent in the south and my mother's handbook was called "The Care and Feeding of Children in Warm Climates." Warm is good. Hot is fine. And summers can never last long enough. It's in my blood.
But summer has more going for it than just heat. Even young children know that summer is different from all other seasons. School stops, schedules disappear. In summer - time has a different quality. There's more of it. Days and weeks stretch endlessly through long, empty summers. It's vacation time. The word is from the latin - vacare meaning freedom. Also respite, intermission, activity suspended, exemption from work. A wonderful word, vacation.
As a child, my summers varied but they all had that "outside of time" quality. I remember the one after fourth grade when we lived in rural Arkansas. There were already four younger children so I was relatively free from supervision. I gathered the fruits of blackberry bushes and pecan trees. Alone, I found my way across a stream and through the woods and up into the foothills of the Ozarks. I succumbed to the power of books –weeping over Little Women, stirred by Robin Hood, and transported by the Swiss Family Robinson.
I was about ten when my mother and stepfather moved to Long Island and my father remarried. Some arcane adult logic decreed that henceforth my sister and I would spend winters in the north and summers in the south while a younger brother would live full time in New Orleans. My REAL life – school, friends, homework, bratty little brothers, girl scouts - took place in the north.
Summers were in another world. Everything was other - climate, culture, home, parents, and the rules. Susie and I boarded a train in New York; 36 hours later we got off in New Orleans. It was a kind of overnight transformation from Ma's unconventional and artistic environment to Papa's middle-class conservatism.
We came to enjoy the trip - sipping ginger ale and playing Canasta in the club car. Practicing being ladylike while tackling impermeable lettuce wedges in the jiggling dining car.
It could not have been easy for my father and stepmother (Papa and Katherine) to keep us entertained. I'm sure it was hard on my little brother, annually evicted from his bedroom. I expect we whined about having nothing to do. But we loved doing nothing. We could spend hours poking the little creatures we called doodle bugs to make them roll up into a ball. I remember long mornings of sitting, in a posture I find hard to believe today, playing endless games of jacks on the cement driveway. Sometimes we took the streetcar to the swimming pool in Audubon Park. We collected amusement park coupons from the grocery store, good for rides on the Whip, the bumper cars, the miniature train that went through a dark tunnel. And the carousel with classic carved wooden animals moving up and down to the music of a real calliope. I can still feel the solid weight of the tarnished brass ring I occasionally snared. Good for one Free Ride!
And there was yet another world, a world of privilege and propriety. My maternal grandparents (known to us as Mere and Daddy) also lived in New Orleans. My grandfather was fun; he joked and taught us to play poker and made sure we won the pot. My grandmother treated us with a fretful indulgence, constantly worrying about germs. She literally believed that money was filthy — demanding brand new bills right from the bank.
Home air-conditioning was unheard of but her house had high ceilings with gentle rotating fans. Tall outdoor shutters were closed all day to shut out the sun, winter woolen rugs were replaced with woven straw and the chairs all had summery slipcovers. The grandparents took us to the country in a big car with jump seats in the back and Blaise at the wheel, spiffy in his chauffeur's cap. The family sugar company had a guest house in Reserve, La., where the refinery was. Once a true plantation home, gardens, pillars and all, it was then used for meetings and family outings. We loved going there, getting all kinds of perks as Mr. Walter's grandchildren — rides on the little steam engine that transported cane from field to refinery; squirts of milk from cows in the damp clean- smelling dairy nearby and special treats from the cook. I never questioned the advantages of one way of life over another until I was older. These differences just were.
Back in the city, there might be a week of Vacation Bible School. The ping pong was OK but I wasn't equipped for competitive bible quoting. That experience just might have kept me from embracing religion.
Most days we stripped to our underwear after lunch and "rested" or read in the breeze of a giant window fan my father had concocted using an outboard motor. Then more games — hearts, anagrams and monopoly while sipping lemonade and Dr. Pepper. In the evening we went for drives to the lakefront, often stopping at an outdoor watermelon stand. Eat in or take out. My father's solemn melon thumping was as central to the ritual as the exuberant seed spitting. Sometime during the summer there was a long car trip to Oklahoma to visit Papa's parents or weekend jaunts "across the lake" to the Gulf Coast where I learned the lazy sport of crabbing. First tie some hunks of bacon in the nets, drop them off a pier, swim, play or snooze for an hour and then pull them up to check for crabs.
As I grew older I spent less time in the south. One summer I went to a Quaker camp in Pennsylvania for a month. Quakers believe whole-heartedly in the value of work. Quakers probably don't go crabbing. Every camper was assigned a task -- mine varied from table clearing to latrine patrol. There, I learned to embrace the silence of Quaker worship as we sat on logs above the banks of the Neshaminy River on Sunday mornings. (I loved saying Neshaminy.) In high school I hung out with friends at Jones Beach. We thought we were pretty cool as, basted with baby oil, we baked in the sun for hours on end. Melanoma? Who knew? And every year I spent at least a month in New Orleans.
As I thought of summer, sensations began to flood in.
The smells of salt water, night blooming jasmine, and coffee roasting — the little grocery in New Orleans roasted beans twice a week. The smell of fresh picked clover flowers, raw material for braiding clover chains and crowns.
The sounds of a policeman's nightstick rippling across iron fences as he walked his evening beat. The morning music of women chanting "fresh figs, fresh figs for sale" as they passed with baskets full. And the trolleys rattling down St. Charles Avenue - did they really go clang, clang? - Or was that the song?
I remember the feel of skinny-dipping under the stars, the water satiny against my skin. My fingers recall the wriggle of a chameleon in my hand and the smoothness of a just peeled sumac wand.
Those memories still feel fresh - though there have been many wonderful summers since I grew up. These days I feel as if I'm holding tightly to the reins as my favorite season gallops past. I long to recapture that carefree open-ended sense of time and possibility. I ponder the wisdom of Calvin, (of Calvin and Hobbes), remarking to his friend Hobbes, "There is never enough time to do all the nothing there is." Or, as Mary Oliver asked in the poem read earlier, "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"
I suggest we wait and watch, listen and feel, and remember as much as we can. And then...do nothing!