Today is the Summer Solstice, the First Day of Summer, the Longest Day of the Year. I love summer. Summer used to mean hauling hay. But it also meant time to ride my horse, bonfires out in the pasture with dutch-oven potatoes followed by marshmallows on a stick. For ten years it meant I got my Real Life back---school was finished and I could stay home and do things around my house every day. Even though I've now taught school for 12 years, I stayed home and was the Mom for 19 years before that and so I'm not accustomed to being considered a "working woman" entirely.
Summer means sweet corn, blue crabs, fresh tomatoes and fire flies in Maryland. Summer means "late night, early morning low-cloudiness", hours at the beach, no rain, and strawberries in South California. Summer means twilight till 10:00, rodeos, and creamed fresh peas in Wyoming.
When I was a little girl summer lasted forever. We had our weekly swimming lesson at a pool that was filled by a natural hot sulfur spring, so we smelled like rotten eggs all the rest of the day. We'd build a little playhouse under the lilac trees with a blanket and pretend to be nurses, using our little brothers for patients. We'd lick a lilac leaf and plaster it on their arms and it would stick like a Bandaide. Sometimes we'd bring a snack into our shady cove by raiding the garden in the only row we were permitted to raid: the turnips. Mother planted the turnips for snacking, so we'd peel and slice it and bring out the salt shaker. They were juicy and a little bit spicy.
Some other blog maybe I'll recount the summer of a working farm girl. But not this one. This blog is for the joys of summer.
Who knew that I'd learn to love summer in the desert? We drove through the Mohave on the annual trek to The Grandmas for twenty years and I'd just grit my teeth as we survived another trip in the latest old vehicle with no air conditioning. But! Ten years of East Coast humidity taught me to finally understand the phrase, "But it's a DRY heat" and now, I just love 100+ degrees: I have a pool.
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