I Wish You Were Here
Summer is more than underway and now that we are at the height of the season, I find myself wondering, how did we live without air conditioning growing up? In fact, we didn’t even have fans but one. A saving grace was that our family room was in the basement where it was always cool. But we traded that chill for spiders as I recall. Daddy-Long-Legs, especially, scurried up the wall behind our heads as we watched afternoon reruns of The Andy Griffith Show in the comforting cool. According to Dad, those spiders were far less menacing than they looked. It was the mosquitoes outside that tormented us.
We did have a small pool in the backyard and it got a lot of use – we hopped into it morning, noon and even night. I remember once swimming in the dark on the very night before school started. And it was easy then to come into that cold basement, dripping and breathless and be able to throw our soaking threadbare towels directly into the washing machine for Mom to deal with the next morning. She used to leave our pajamas stacked on the dryer so we could get bed-ready quickly. In our house, swimming in the pool was akin to having taken a bath. Life was simple – hot weather, pools, and soft worn pajamas…
Where I live now, summer turns our town into a hectic resort. And it’s all about the beach. I see mothers with large wagons dragging children and paraphernalia to our sandy enclave on the bay every morning and space fills up fast. But in the afternoons, singletons my age, trot to the sea with one chair and a book to sit and read by the water’s edge. Occasionally, I am one of them and I sit alone with my book and hat on my favorite rickety chair. I don’t even wear my swimsuit but stay in shorts, t-shirt and flip-flops. It’s so nice and easy. I smile at the other folks and we nod because I think they like the simplicity of our way of beaching it too. At our age, we don’t need wagons, plastic toys, chic bathing suits, and bright zippered coolers with snacks. A hat, a book, an old chair and a juicy peach makes a lovely late afternoon for sometimes summer can be just “too”… like a cold that feels so much worse in hot weather.
Beside bare-bones beaching-going, how do I keep this warm season simple with all the kayaks and boats bobbing in and around the ocean and being endlessly towed through the no-longer quiet streets of my town? The motorcycles, the fireworks, the heat and the endless pressure – how can one slow the pace and find the quiet center of this special and evanescent season? By going back I believe…going back to the threadbare towels and the spiders. To the late-night swims and musty paperbacks…to old reruns, soft clothes…to hotdogs with yellow mustard, tomato sandwiches on white bread which hasn’t been in this house for years. And since my town is so popular, I might buy a few of the many pretty postcards I’ve seen at the village drugstore. I’ll send them to far-flung friends. “I wish you were here” is all I’ll write…
~
Let July be July.
Let August be August.
And let yourself just be,
Even in the uncertainty…
You don’t have to fix everything.
You don’t have to solve everything.
And you can still find peace,
and grow…
in the wild of changing things.
~MHN
9 Comments
Elizabeth
Lovely post!! Yep, no AC for us either growing up…tho’ we had a swamp cooler, which only felt good if you were standing directly in front of it. Had fans around…which helped some in hot California sunny summers. But it seemed cooler to sit under the old willow tree as anywhere else. Moved to Idaho at age 14, and then summers were much easier to endure…at least nights were cool, so we opened up the house then to cool off for the next day.
A Lovely Inconsequence
Thank you Elizabeth! Idaho? Must have been lovely!
Ann Y.
Same here…no air conditioning. A metal double tub was our pool….I still remember that feeling of hot nights, pjs on, sitting on the floor watching tv with a vanilla popsicle ! Thanks for bring back the memories!
DAD
beautifully written, memories of #31
Karen
I love, love, love this post. Thank you! I grew up on a dairy farm where our summers were spent weeding the big garden in the full sun, preserving, pickling and making jam in the steamy kitchen, and often harvesting hay in the evenings when my dad came home from his day job. My poor mom did the work of three women on those summer days. I still live vicariously, dreaming about idyllic childhood summers. These days I often have time to take my chair, my hat, my peach and my book somewhere to relax, ponder and reminisce. The beach is a 30-minute drive away in city traffic but we sometimes do that too. Bless you, my friend. You have very evocative memories (even if they aren’t mine) and I sink into them every time you post. Happy summer!
xo the other karen
Amy
We still don’t have air conditioning! We live in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and it only gets truly hot and humid for about a week every year. We get along with old fans and a jaunt down to Lake Superior, a mile away.
Thank you for reminding me that summer is flying by and I haven’t made time to sit at the beach with my feet in the water, reading a good summer novel. I’m putting that in my calendar for every Friday until summer ends.
Debra Rodgers
And don’t forget the clear iced tea that Nana made which came with sugar restrictions or fresh squeezed limeade (no sugar restrictions at the other grandma’s 😉).
Karen
I wish I was there too! We didn’t have air-conditioning either, and we somehow survived. In fact my vivid memories of those very simple summers was the lack of agenda! Our mothers did not have us signed up for 1 million activities…no theater camps or ballet camps or soccer camps… We occasionally had vacation Bible school and possibly some lanyard making instruction at the local community rec center. One sixth grade summer, I joined a dozen other eggheads in my class and we went to places around the Washington DC area (where I lived) to see historic sites and take notes. That was my idea of a screamingly exciting week! There’s a real beauty about that kind of low key simplicity, isn’t there?
Thank you for these thoughts, they took me to a happy place. A simplified summer! I love it. Time to grab my musty paperback and sun hat and head to my backyard deck to enjoy those old fashion pleasures.
Tracy
Thank you for bringing me back to Grams bungalow basement. I played with the daddy long legs and Gram would be cooking or watching her “stories”, soap operas, in the cool, calm underground.
After a trip to the park, she’d give me a bath in the utility sink; hugging me dry with a soft towel.
God bless grandparents.
Lovely post.