Summertime...and the Nostalgia is Easy

What was summertime to you as a child?

For me, it was: hot hot hot hot hot, with an extra added dose of 100% humidity and hot, mediated by a lack of central air conditioning, and topped with some hot hot hotness. 

I lived in Georgia. We had an attic fan, which, if you opened all the windows and turned it on, could force a powerful breeze through the entire house. This would have been delightful if the temperature outside had been something less than, say, 98 degrees with a 98% humidity rating. But during the day, we knew better than to turn on the fan, since all it did was forcefully pull the hot damp rag of humid hotness in through the windows. The house, at about 88 degrees, was actually cooler than the outdoors.

Once night fell, and the air outside cooled down (to a respectable what? oh, call it 85), we turned on the attic fan and then felt positively chilled in our beds.

But summertime was also:

• after-dinner games of Tiger or Kick the Can with all the neighbor kids
• watching Junebugs pile upon one another in the pools of street-lamp light
• feeling the warmth of the asphalt under your sturdy bare feet as you trotted home after dark
• spending long, lazy afternoons reading in the branches of the giant magnolia tree down the block
• ice cream parties in the neighbors' backyard
• listening to adults gossip over tall glasses ice tea
• listening to records in the attic bedroom of a friend who was actually a boy -- pop songs! in a boy's bedroom!
• a glorious sense of freedom

A few days ago, Son asked me, "Mama, what is Summer?" with some clear confusion in his tone. It's not that he doesn't know his seasons. It's that for the first time in his life, he is living on a school-year calendar, and as the last few weeks of Kindergarten approach, his friends are beginning to talk with eager anticipation about Summer.

Summer, of course, means Summer Vacation.  A break from the rigors of school. No more homework. No more reading what someone else says you have to read. No more five-days-a-week-in-a-desk. Lots of his friends have older siblings, so they know all about Summer.

My son, on the other hand, is not only the oldest. He is also a child who has always been in a daycare/preschool that was year-round. We would take vacations at Christmas and in the summer, but all year, he would be at "school" two or three days per week.

Summer for him has always been a season.

It has never been an event.

I realized as I was out for a run a few days ago, and I saw all the new neighbors with kids who have moved in over the last six months, that Summer for me always meant having a posse of kids around the block with whom anything was possible. We could invent games, stage plays, spy on our siblings or each other, have crushes, write notes, go to the local swimming pool.

We could, in short, just BE.  We could spend long hours in a group of our own choosing, setting our own rules and living according to our own whims.

I want that for my kids. I want them to remember the golden days of summer as largely unscripted and glorious in their possibility. I want them to be able to build and create and read and dream and run barefoot in the grass without having to report in every ten minutes.

I haven't figured out exactly how to do this for Son yet, how to give him the gift of freedom (particularly since there are not many children his age within walking distance, and we do not live on the sort of block on which I grew up, where everyone knew everyone else and the doors were all open to everyone all summer long). But I want to figure it out.

And I am committed to ensuring that this year, he will finally learn that even if you have to spend two days per week in day camp, Summer is indeed a sparkling season full of promise.

This year, at our house, Summer is going to be an event.