(No that is not a picture from the 1930’s Grapes of Wrath, that’s my brother and me, post Camp Fun Time one summer in the 1960’s)
It felt like summer here in LA last week.
With temps in the nineties and clear crisp blue skies, we’ve seemed to have skipped spring and jumped straight into July.
I’ve noticed that summer or anything resembling summer, does something to my molecules.
It makes them…dance. The longer days, the warm nights, all conspire to make me…restless.
And …happy.
Why? What does summer mean to me?
The feelings run deep, stemming all the way back to my childhood, which got me to thinking…
Summer is visceral, it’s cellular memory, and as a kid in the San Fernando Valley in the sixties summer meant:
Lemonade stands;
Sleepovers;
Looking for lady bugs armed with my bug jar and figuring out just the right leaf to ladybug ratio for their survival;
Walking all the way to the dime store for an Abba Zabba;
Bare feet so dirty we had to wash them before bed;
Flip flops (always blue) and ice cream cones (rocky road) from Thrifty’s;
Zinc Oxide on my pug nose (sunscreen hadn’t been invented);
Watermelon;
The street lights coming on after seven;
Hosing down the cement walkway to make it slick enough for our own homemade Slip N Slide;
Running thru the sprinklers and the smell of wet grass;
Collecting and then spending hours wetting and pasting green stamps in book after book in order to get ourselves a kiddy pool;
Short pink cotton pjs;
Root beer floats at the Drive In;
Red Vines at the weekly kids matinees at the band new multiplex in Panorama City where I saw my first movie made from a book I had read and LOVED, Islands of the Blue Dolphins
(totally radical concept for me at the time);
Staying up late,(sneak eating Red Vines) and reading the latest Nancy Drew by the dim light of my little desk lamp so my sister with whom I shared a room, could sleep. (I just saw some of the same old editions I used to read at a little neighborhood second-hand store and I teared up. Those are some gooooood memories.)
Charcoal and lighter fluid barbecues;
How different the classrooms and the entire school for that matter felt during summer school;
Culottes and tanned legs so skinny they look like pipe cleaners;
Camp Funtime (war-paint, beaded necklaces, and lanyard see the picture above);
Frozen grape Kool Aid Popsicles;
Selma’s (our neighbor’s aunt) beautiful built-in swimming pool;
The long drive to the beach with a car full of kids and then shlepping all our shit down to the water’s edge.
Egg salad sandwiches at the beach;
The hum of air conditioners;
Dodger baseball games on the radio At ALL TIMES (the voice of Vin Scully);
So when the weather gets into the nineties like it did last week and it releases all these great childhood cellular memories, I’m suddenly reminded that summer is my favorite season.
Until I think of Christmastime…
What triggers your spring or summer fever? What’s your favorite season and why?
Carry on’
xox
