I remember some of these summers too.
But by early teens were not as romantic.
For mostly, I worked with my dad building a house. Our house.
I am nostalgic about those days now, they all blur into a line of hope where I am 17 again. Not wishing I had more quality time left to spend with my parents.
But at the time – those days were a drudgery.
Most of my carefree summers were in college and graduate school.
I worked at a summer camp and was out with a group of friends all-hours every night of the week.
We rode with the windows down in the night’s heat and had no clue how fleeting it was that we were all young and beautiful.
Mornings would come after only a few hours of sleep and we would do it all again.
It’s wonderful and its gone.
And your memory never does it justice, does it?
Those summers of my early teens were glorious. Dad taught all of us to water-ski, and we swam in his giant rock pool that fed into the lake, and we went on long jeep rides at his farm in Bon Aqua, seventy miles from the lake house. We picked wild blackberries and he played guitar and we sang in the evenings. Out on the lawn after the sun went down, he made homemade peach ice cream with peaches from his orchard, setting off firecrackers while he cranked the ice cream maker. He cranked that old silver tub for an hour or more, but he never complained. He picked up all the kids in the extended family—June’s sisters Helen’s and Anita’s kids, and various other children in the neighborhood—and took us to the movies when it was too hot to play outside. Sometimes he took us to three movies in a day. He rented the roller skating rink so we could skate together, undisturbed by fans.
