And summer comes

I always forget certain elements of seasons. Summer, for example - when it started up here this year, it was super humid. Not hot yet, but humid.

And while I don't like humidity, and especially don't like it in my house when I'm trying to sleep, and don't like the still, humid air that happens (for example, in a classroom building where the air conditioning is off), still, there's something about it that reminds me.

I remember when I was a kid, the slightly-warmer and humid conditions were what brought in summer. Granted, in northern Ohio, it got cool overnight (even at the height of summer, which it doesn't do here). Often mornings were cool and foggy. We've had a bit of that here and it's funny how that feeling brings me back to my childhood - going to day camp with my friends (Day Camp was at "the Academy" - Western Reserve Academy, where I later went to high school). The daily round of tennis, crafts, and swimming. (Day camp is where a sympathetic swimming teacher helped me get over my fear of deep water that an earlier swimming teacher caused - because he threw me into the deep end after I said I wasn't ready to go in). One day a week - Thursdays, I think? - we had an all-day session and did field trips. And sometimes we had mornings where we just played a big game, like a campus-wide version of Capture the Flag. (I loved that game. I was fast and stealthy as a kid so that was the kind of active game I was good at. I wasn't aggressive or coordinated so things like kickball or dodgeball weren't so fun - though kickball really wasn't that bad, and I found that playing it as an adult with the Youth Group kids it's really kind of fun - but I really liked hide and seek and capture the flag, games like that).

I'm glad I got to go to day camp. Not just because that's where I became able to swim again, not just because I learned the basics of tennis, but it was just a fun experience. I remember the kids there as being nicer than the kids at school (I THINK it was an all-girls camp? Or maybe girls were one session in the summer and boys were another? I only remember going to camp with girls). Part of it may have been there were girls from a couple different schools there, and so the cliques and hierarchies were kind of disrupted and in abeyance, and even an unpopular kid like me was treated okay. (Also, I was good at crafts and good at memorizing stuff for some of the little drama productions we did, so maybe my capability at practical stuff earned me some respect. And I was okay at tennis and some of the other games). 

There were a lot of idyllic things about my childhood summers that are now happy memories - day camp, and the summer reading club at the library, and climbing trees, and playing huge elaborate games of kick-the-can with the kids across the street, and "exploring," and going on vacation with my family.....I talk about the miserable parts of my childhood a lot but really the summers weren't all that bad, maybe because, like I said, some of the hierarchy and the cliquishness from school was absent. (And the kids across the street were cool - they were all different ages and they weren't exactly "popular" kids so that sort of thing didn't matter to them, what mattered was that you were willing to play H-O-R-S-E or frisbee or go "exploring" with them.)