Some summer memories (I)

 Back a couple weeks ago, when I was giving an exam, the lawnmowers were up at the campus. I could hear them faintly even with the classroom door closed. It's funny how random things make you remember; the sound of mowing machines working across a large swath of lawn (we are some distance from the rest of campus and there's a lot of lawn space between them and us) and it made me think of the playing fields at my various grade schools, and the last days of school, and often, those last few days, they'd be out to mow for the first time in the year.

(Also, when I was a kid, school ended later than my university does - we were still going into early June). 

But now I think of those playing fields. At some of the schools, there were houses all around them (and the lucky kids who lived there: they could walk to school, and I am pretty sure when school wasn't in session no one stopped the kids from going and playing on the playground. In these now, more-litigious times, I bet that's no longer allowed.

The fields, though - this was where soccer met, and t-ball (my brother did both when he was small, and soccer when he was not so small) and field hockey.

I had one brief, disastrous season of field hockey. My parents thought I needed more exercise and told me I needed to do a sport, so I chose field hockey, thinking, maybe, all girls, maybe they'd be nicer? In retrospect, I probably should have gone out for the mixed-team soccer: there were a few boys in the program that were kind of my friends, or at the very least, didn't torment me. But from field hockey I remember being excluded and that sort of nasty laughter and the girls "testing" my shinguards for me by whacking them with their sticks. 

I was not much one for team sports. I did kind of like the pick-up games of kickball we sometimes played in gym or at recess (or: a few times, towards the end of the year, the teacher would take us out at the end of the day to play as an extra recess). I know there's a joke that kickball is baseball for kids they don't trust with bats, though really, at my school, I think it was baseball/softball for kids where no one really had developed the skills to pitch well...

But I remember the smell of those big, newly mown fields. And I remember sitting on some early summer evenings in a lawn chair while my brother played t-ball (oh, team sports were a lot more sedate then; I only remember parents cheering on kids for either doing well, or sometimes when they were having a tough time, and not the fights with refs you hear about now) or going out on Saturdays when he played soccer. 

And I remember that summer expectation - those last few days of school. Even though I *liked* school and enjoyed learning, I also liked being off for summer - I had happy expectations when I was small of doing the summer reading program at the library, or having time to play, or getting together with some of the kids on the street and roaming all over the neighborhood, walking down to the creek to catch frogs (we never caught any; they were too fast) and just generally doing more or less what I wanted. 

And I remember the trips to do things - the weekly (sometimes twice a week) trips to the library for books, and the occasional trip to The Attic (for penny candy, or sometimes a small toy), or Saywell's to get an ice cream cone...