The summer is slowly slipping away and I find myself remembering childhood summers of long, long ago.
What a treat it was to shuck my shoes and go barefoot all summer, mindless of the heat from the sidewalks and the rough stones and briars from the nearby empty lots and fields.
Going barefoot translated into FREEDOM for me and I loved every minute of it.
I do not understand how my feet could have survived the heat and the many cuts and bruises that occured as I ran and played and climbed the chinaberry tree in the front yard and the peach tree in the back yard, skipped down the hot sidewalks to my friends house, made mud pies and toad frog houses in her sandbox,then later walked a few blocks to the small store that sold penny candy.
With no such thing as air conditioning, the summer heat of Georgia was not as oppressive then as it seems now.
Back then I was young.
Now I am old and too tender to go barefoot in the summer.
Everyday memories are the best and most precious of childhood.
(What are some of your everyday memories of childhood?)
10 comments:
I remember playing marbles (agees) with a girlfriend. She would WASH her marbles after we played the game. I never knew anyone that did that.
I am still friends with her and you know what - she's a perfectionist - everything has to be just so.
That's the way she was as a child and that's the way she is to this day!
I remember crawling under the pomegranate trees in my grandmother's back yard and getting the juice all over my clothes, swinging on a rope swing and getting pine needles in my shoes, climbing trees and power poles and scaffolds, collecting rocks and leaves and bugs and seeds and flowers. I remember playing hop scotch and jacks and cat's cradle with girl friends.
I remember spending a week visiting my grandmother who lived across the road from my uncle's dairy farm. I took trips around the world on a rubber tire swing in her front yard and she played right along with my fantasy.
The same as yours. I don't know how my feet survived either. I even went into the woods barefoot (with snakes and other creepy-crawlies). I loved creeks and turning over rocks, and catching lightning bugs and building forts.
(Millie's friend sounds like Monk...LOL)
I remember tightening roller skates onto my shoes with a key and jumping rope to rhyming sing-songs. I remember riding a big, blue Schwinn bicycle that was too large for me and heavy to lift up the curbs. I remember playing "fallout shelter", saving ends of soap bars and scraps of cloth for emergency supplies to help our families and neighbors after the nuclear bomb drops. I remember walking to the library for summer reading--American Girl and Seventeen. I remember finding the old mystery series my mother had read as a child and reading those. I remember paging through and spot reading the whold World Book Junior encyclopedia and finding $50 tucked in there for safe keeping (I got to keep a quarter). I remember climbing my grandmother's fruit trees and eating fresh peaches and plums with the juice running down my chin and up my arms. Thanks for the memories.
Popsicles! Walking barefoot home from the corner store with a friend and breaking the popsicles in half and swapping so we could taste each flavor ... later trying to explain the new red and orange drip stains, along with the sweat and dirt, down the front of my shirt.
I remember riding the train from Penna to Mass to visit my Grandmother summers and eating in the dining car. My mother and I would both order welsh rabbit as it was the least expensive item on the menu. I still love. Hoodsie cups with half vanilla ice cream and half orange sherbet. I remember summer vacations that seemed to stretch on for ever and that now slip be so quickly.
Walking on Texas streets, so hot that the tar from the asphalt bubbled and being tough enough to pop those bubbles with my toes.
I don't think my feet truly came clean until sometime around December, then I couldn't wait for the heat to start the cycle all over again.
Thanks to all of you for sharing your childhood summer memories. So many of them we all seem to share.
My fondest childhood summers where spent visiting my grandparents and cousins in a very small town in Saskatchewan. My grandpa owned the local Butcher store and we would spend much of our mornings with him in the shop.. watching him make his famous German sausage. The afternoons were spent gallivanting about town with our cousins. The late evenings were spent playing Lemonade in the Shade in my grandma's big yard.. lit only by the summer moon.
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