Summers gone by

(Doing a few time-embargoed posts in my absence. I will be back in early June)

Summers were different when I was a kid. I suspect part of it was the lack of expectations that existed for me. I was a kid. My raisons d'etre were to go to school during the school year, and to have fun when I was out of school. My whole life stretched in front of me; I didn't have a "legacy" to worry about, or responsibilities heavier than the few chores I did.

And so summer was really a vacation. It was all about having fun.

Several years running, the last day of school (which was also often a half-day, and just a "clean out your lockers/return your textbooks" day, and the school already felt empty and smelled like summer), the bus driver would take the route in the opposite way - going to what had been the last stop first, and as a result, we got to see areas of the route we normally never saw.

And then, that getting off the bus on the last day of school, the summer stretching before me like a clean sheet of paper waiting to be drawn on. And there were things to do:

- The library book club
- Running around and "exploring" the neighborhood (including an area laid out for, but never built to when we were kids, a housing development) with the kids across the street
- Climbing trees
- Trying to catch frogs with my friend Elizabeth
- Playing with my stuffed animals. Or my little plastic animals. Or with Lego. Or coloring/drawing/writing stories

A couple of years there was day camp for a few weeks, where I got to swim and play tennis and do crafts and hang around with other kids (and several of them were my relatively-few school friends, and even at that....I don't remember the mean girls from school being there, so I don't know, maybe there were kids from other districts? Or maybe the "rules" that held during school were in abeyance?)

I do remember going out early in the morning and it being cool and slightly damp (it got cold enough overnight for there to be dew nearly every night) and the world looked and especially smelled fresh and new.

And that's something I miss in our hot summers as an adult - many mornings now I walk out and the world smells just as stale and old as it did the night before. I do not think it is just being a disillusioned adult, because there are a few days - usually in May, here, now - that I do get a sense of that memory, of walking out into a cool morning that is like a blessing even if the day is going to be hot, and getting that sense of things seeming new...