Photo by Bill Jobe, Killbear Provincial Park
Summer as a kid for me: it was home-made popsicles made from jugs of Kool-Aid, games of Kick-the-Can with the neighbourhood kids, and bouquets of wildflowers picked from the meadows behind our farmhouse.
It was rolling down a grassy hill like a cast-off log, snapping fresh green and wax beans with mom on the back porch, and running with my dog through fields of long grass.
I remember sleeping on a groundsheet overnight, cuddled up in a warm sleeping bag, lost in the canopy of stars above me.
Oh, that noisy cricket in my bedroom that I could never find.
Fresh-picked corn-on-the-cob drenched in butter was a favourite (still is), as was wading in the creek, toes squishing through gooey, thick, black mud. It was so much fun scooping up tadpoles out of the back swamp and building tree forts with bits of deadfall and scrap lumber.
It was running my bicycle up and down the long gravel laneway leading to our country house. I used to sit for hours gathering the most colourful stones; sparkling quartz, red granite, and fossilized limestone. I used to put them into old pickle jars full of water to bring out their true colours and beauty and put them on my dresser so I could enjoy them longer.
It was whittling away the end of my wooden stick to a fine sharp point with a penknife so that I could slide my slippery hot dog on to cook over a burning campfire, without splitting the skin and it falling off into the hot coals. There was a knack to that!
When I was ten years old, I remember building a pair of stilts out of extra lumber from the garage and teaching myself how to walk on them. I walked all the way from my house to Tim Horton’s Donut shop, two full blocks away and back, on those homemade wooden stilts.
It was afternoons at the park with my brother and sister, running from swings, to the merry-go-round, to rocking horses, to teeter-totters and back again. I learned to pump my legs back and forth and throw my body weight forward and back to send my swing soaring into the sky to greet the clouds, then falling into a downward arc back to the earth, hair tossing and flowing, smiles and giggles glowing. The teeter-totter was tricky. You had to find the right balance with your partner or you might find yourself stuck at the top, them chortling with glee as they looked up at you from their grounded perch.
It was sandy beaches and shovels and buckets of endless construction. You had to get enough water in the sand so that it would stick well and keep its shape but not too much or it slid out of your bucket in a slippery cascade. It was lapping ripples on your toes or wading waves that knocked you over with their rolling, foaming power. It was swimming underwater and opening your eyes to see sunbeams streaming through the blurred world of water and under you, rippled mini-sandbars formed by the endless swells. Here you weighed nothing and could kick and swim freely; here, gravity was powerless. How long you could hold your breath became a challenge so you could stay in that underwater world as long as possible.
It was camping holidays in the old tent trailer, the fresh damp smell of aged canvas and the sound of falling pine needles leaving their shadowed silhouettes on the roof. It was being first up and opening the trailer door and catching the early glow of twilight before night finally gives up its ghost and the morning sun claims the day. For a moment, that magical moment, the world is silent, holding its breath before it all begins.
It was rubber balls, and skipping ropes, and baseballs and bats. My favourite game involved an Indian rubber ball in an old stocking, and I chanted as I bounced that ball off the outside brick wall of my family home: “Hello, hello, hello, sir. Are you coming out, sir? Yes, sir. No, sir. Why, sir? Because I have a cold, sir. Where’d you catch the cold, sir? At the North Pole, sir. What you doing there, sir? Catching polar bears, sir. How many did you catch, sir? One, sir. Two, sir. Three, sir. Four, sir. Five, sir. Six, sir. Seven, sir. Eight, sir. Nine, sir. Ten, sir. That’s enough for me, sir.”
It was buzzing bees and a hornet’s nest high in the tree. It was sprouting mushrooms in the forest, smelling earthy and moist. It was slices of watermelon, juices dripping down my chin, seeds spitting out of my mouth.
It was chasing butterflies through fields of yellow buttercups and white feathered Queen Anne’s Lace while leaping grasshoppers bounded out of my way.
It was rainbow colours arcing across the sky after a cooling rain on a hot, steamy summer day. At night, it was the patter of raindrops on my grandparent’s aluminum siding farmhouse roof, lulling me to sleep.
Most of all, it was lying back on warm rocks, the hot sun melting my body into a pool of calm. That’s still my favourite. When the doctor says, “Go to your happy place,” that’s where I go. Those hot flat rocks at Killbear Park.
Oh, what a delight summer was. And still is.