School's Out!

Hi guys! The last day of school finally arrived this past week. I haven't voluntarily set foot in a school in many happy years but the Last Day is always an exciting day for me--- it was always my very most favorite day of the school year.

For years I took special photos of my kids: wearing shorts, a new backpack, and a hopeful face on the first day of school, then another of the gleeful child, again in shorts, usually posed by the iris or rhododendrons, celebrating that final day ten long months later.
Schools here start at the old traditional time of after Labor Day, but classes go on all through June. My school was old-fashioned, observed that farm tradition of the kids having to be off for the planting season. So my school ended the Wednesday after Memorial. Yay!
Three glorious months of freedom.

 

 

We---my brother and I---didn't go to sleep away camp, or even regular day camp, but my parents always made summer's beginnings so fun. Silver dollars for good report cards! And always some kind of goofy game, like badminton or wiffle ball, from our dad.

 
One year an ancient croquet set appeared. Another time the summer game was a hilariously in retrospect lethal thing with hula hoop targets and huge heavy darts with sharp steel tips! (Maybe called Javelin Toss?) They were hard to throw so everyone survived. Another year we got an equally scary archery set. Then when we were older a small sailboat my dad built during the winter, in the garage.

Mostly we ran through the sprinkler, or later enjoyed the pool at the ''swim club''. Or we rode our bikes and skateboards. We liked unplanned games, like abandoned-field baseball and catching lightning bugs.

My mom had other ideas, as she was the person at home with us mostly. A favorite tradition was our summer book she and I read together. My mother liked to nap, a concept that to me was entirely out of the question, so she had the notion that after lunch each day we'd retire to chaise lounges on the brick patio [made by daddy] and read a chapter of our summer book. The patio was to me beautiful, made with recycled old pink bricks, edged by flower beds on one side and enclosed with an old green wrought iron fence and gate, on the other. I thought the fence looked like Roman spears. In June that fence was covered in fragrant pink climber roses and honeybees.

When I finished third grade, our book of the summer was Little Women [Louisa May Alcott]. I don't recall it too well anymore but at the time I loved it. Imagine having sisters! Four of them!
We'd read a chapter then mom would doze off. After a week or so that bored me and I read the entire book by myself, much to mom's dismay. After that I was on my own: favorites I recall were the Narnia series [C S Lewis; fifth grade summer] and Little House on the Prairie series [Laura Ingalls Wilder]. I also loved my mom's vintage Nancy Drew collection, then things like A Gift from the Sea , by Anne Morrow Lindberg, though I suppose I didn't understand it; mysteries by Mary Stewart and Mary Renault, and classics like Rebecca and Jamaica Inn, by Daphne DuMaurier.

today's Gift from the Sea

Both my parents were good at teaching without being teachy. My dad taught me to embroider, then to machine sew, and to quilt; less popular were lessons in fishing and fence painting. My mother did art lessons with me, quite technical, shading for volume, perspective. Then my dad taught me to oil paint.

Probably what I loved best---and why I became a fashion designer?--- was the exciting treat of a trip into the city to a special department store which back then sold beautiful cottons and wools. I'd get a "good haircut'' [hopeless]; have lunch with Mother or daddy, then I'd be allowed to choose as many as six tiny 1/4 yard cuts of cotton lawn or calico, to make dresses for my wooden antique Hitty doll. No Barbie for me, sigh. I loved that doll and still have her in her old cedar trunk. The tiny clothes aren't made so well. But I was only 7 or 8, or ten.....

 

Later in the summer we'd dry lavender and make sachets. Yes, just like I make now, though since my mom did not sew we made tiny hanky bundles. We'd can tomatoes, make pickles. Or a pie. Most summers included cooking lessons: from how to bake a potato [''400 degrees for forty minutes''] to classic meat sauce or marinara sauce and eggplant parmesan. My mother wrote out each recipe by hand in a red gingham covered spiral notebook which I still have and use. [Basic cooking temps, how to prep a turkey. Potatoes Dauphine. Apple tartin. A fail: salad nicoise, eeew. Like I would actually eat fishy stuff? My dad's specialty was deep fried donuts! Imagine that. And one year we made deep fried onion rings with all the extra onions from the garden. Beer batter. Awesome.

powder puff clouds

Reflections of powder puff clouds

Reflections of powder puff clouds
I loved how the thin film of the receding waves
mirrored the clouds in the sky...

And so another summer begins. What will the long days bring to me this year? Let us hope better health than last year.

How about you? What is your favorite memory from from childhood summers? Do you enjoy summer now, or is it just hot and annoying? Tell me!

 

 

 

 

love

 

lizzy

 

gone to the beach............

 

Hitty- Her First Hundred Years  [I wasn't too happy to read that it has been ''updated'', rewritten and an oh so trendy Civil War chapter added. Poor Hitty! But I suppose I must buy a copy and see what ''they'' have done to my beloved story book.