Ode to Summers of Childhood Past

When I was a little kid growing up in a very small farm in Southern New Jersey, summers were very simple. They weren’t like the summers that the various Main Line kids I used to babysit have. Because these kids were born to parents with giant, paper calendars in their kitchens that graph out in ink the activities they’ve picked out for the little ones. Soccer. Violin. Reading lessons. Language school. Tap dancing. Ballet. Math camp. Summer camp. Activities, activities, activities. And when I used to babysit, I’d see the kids sigh and shake their heads in a manner too old for their age. They’d go to their parents with pleading eyes. “But I’m tired. Why can’t I just stay home?”

“Oh sweetie, you know you can’t do that! You don’t want to fall behind! Besides, mommy and dad have to work!” Nervous glance in my direction.

“But I’m tired!”

“I know, sweetie, why don’t you go watch your favorite Hannah Montana show, okay? I’ll get you some crackers.”

[Pouting.] “Okay.”

I always felt for my charges. Mini-adults whose every moment was accounted for. Those were the moments when I stopped being impressed by the mansions, the luxury SUVs and the designer suits…

My summers were a little different. My summers were about chores done early in the morning and late in the evening, so the sun’s rays wouldn’t get you. The chores? Weeding the one-acre garden my mother planted every summer. Sneaking peas and strawberries from the plants, hoping she wasn’t paying attention. She was, but she never minded. Picking hundreds of potato bugs off the potato plants with my cousins and then gleefully flushing them down the toilet. Washing the chickens’ water bowl with the garden hose and filling it with fresh, clean water. And after chores?

After chores we did nothing. Nothing at all. I lazed under the trees that covered the property and picked bouquets of wild pansies that my mother would put in a miniature ceramic teapot on her kitchen windowsill, which overlooked the yard where we played. When it got too hot to play outside, my older brother and I huddled on the carpet with sofa cushions and blankets to shield us from the draft of the air conditioner and read our way through the Hardy Boy series.

And if that failed for entertainment, we stacked four kids and five cushions – human sandwiches – into a tower that collapsed as soon as one of us giggled. And then there were the tea parties I threw in my front yard with my dolls, my baby brother and my puppy. The dolls were just as real as anyone else, naturally, and were treated as such. My little brother let me dress him up in bonnets and sashes and the puppy likewise endured his share of familial obligations.

After dinner, we would climb the small tree that grew behind the chicken coops to the roof. If it had been a particularly hot day, our bare feet would stick to the tar of the roof. It made wet, slapping sounds as we ran across it. Our mother would gesture furiously from the driveway, but every now and then my older brother jumped off the roof, just to say he’d done it. Every summer, there were plans to build elaborate tree houses. I would hold the nails while my brother hammered. I winced every time he swung the hammer, but he never mashed a finger. Now that I think about it, we never got further than half a dozen planks across a couple of branches, but what more could we want?

There were excursions to the woods behind us, where the wild blackberries grew and deer flashed their startled eyes at us while running away. Honeysuckles grew there and we spent considerable time trying to draw beads of sweet nectar from their vanilla-colored flowers. There was a stream and a grassy meadow with a fence that only the older boys could climb.

And if we got tired of all that? There was the library. “There’s nothing to do!” we’d mutter peckishly to our mother.  Then off the library we would go, one mom, four kids and a tote bag. And we would run in the doors only to stop,  hushed by the cavernous layout that was the Vineland Public Library. My mother would take the babies (who have always been and will always be the babies) by the hand and take them to the childrens’ section and read to them. And my older brother and I would be off. There was always a rush to find the best books, to trump the other sibling with a hitherto unread copy of some series we’d been following. I realize now that all of the books I read now were geared towards young boys, I idolized my brother that much. They were detective novels, action thrillers and animal stories. But when he started veering into non-fiction books on the galaxy and building paper airplanes, I fled to fantasy. At the checkout counter, the librarians would smile at us and we’d smile back and shush the babies. We never checked out any videocassettes. We didn’t have a TV and neither did any of our friends.

Summer meals were light. My stay-at-home mother had a very specific summer menu that she spent hours tinkering with. There were yogurt raithas and chutneys that burned our American palates. Apples and cherries that we’d picked from our neighbor’s orchard the day before. Sour imli that my parents got from the Indian store in Philadelphia that I would eat until my teeth squeaked together. Mango lassis she made in the blender. Kulfi, that she froze in the popsicle makers we’d gotten from the dollar store.  Lamps chops for after-church Sunday lunches, after we rushed home to take off our Sunday best and play outside in bare feet.

And when we went to our Mennonite neighbor’s house? There my best friend and I would eat sour, unripe apples. Only one bite from each apple. And sour grapes that made our throats hoarse and our mothers angry. And on special occasions, apple dumplings. Along with ice-cream that we had to churn on her grandmother’s front porch. And that her grandfather would later give a last few turns to before pronouncing it “perfect.” And doughnuts. Oh the doughnuts. They were always the same recipe, the ones Grandma Sarah brought to school once a year for us kids as the end reward for our annual scavenger hunt. Plain sugar donuts that Grandma Sarah, whose plump little frame was stuffed into a white bonnet, grey dress and a black apron, fried into a crisp, perfect circle. A circle that went down in two bites. She would feed us doughnuts and milk in her kitchen. “Don’t tell the boys I made doughnuts,” she’d whisper, “They’ll interrupt my work.” Then she would feed the boys. “Don’t tell the girls I made doughnuts, “she’d whisper. Nobody ever told.

Besides church and the library – the grocery story was our only other weekly outing. My brother and I would rush to the freezer aisle and stay there until our teeth chattered. It was a test of endurance. We’d watch our mother, who always wore a full shalwar kameze, politely say “No habla Espanol” to the dozens of Mexican migrant workers that had come to our town to pick produce in the fields surrounding our farm. Later, others came. And stayed. But in those days, they were still new and we were still outsiders together, who could perhaps tell each other of the best place to buy jeans. Or toothpaste.

And then we moved to Philadelphia. And there was a whole new kind of summer. Trying and failing to learn how to double-dutch with the neighbor girls. Playing manhunt around the blocks until my mother threatened us with her slipper. The ice-cream truck, whose call was certainly worse than anything the sirens of old could have conjured. Running around the Art Museum in the evenings, in my rollerblades. Riding bicycles with my dad on our tandem bike with twenty or so kids running behind use. (Whether it was out of sheer astonishment or summer boredom, I was never sure.) Drawing on the sidewalks with chalk. And always, the library.