June

Hi! June is such a hopeful month....everything is bright and shiny and new. Treads on your flipflops, no rust on your beach chair, towels all Downy-fluffy and sweet smelling. Roses are in bloom everywhere, and the air is scented with the shy delight of honeysuckle that blooms on the dunes and marsh verges.

curbside volunteer Sweet William

A new case of red Solo cups, burgers in the fridge. American flags at the ready for the celebrations to come.

You couldn't ask for a nicer day than today. Yesterday's frigid storm has gone, the sky is blue with a big puffy 30 mph wind. Dry air so it feels cooler than the actual 70-ish degrees.

I sat on my deck for awhile, sewing Dotty 365s.

Leaves me maybe too much time to think, and remember. Like how when my kids were tiny, we'd arrive here in June and settle in. Before their day camp would start, I'd have a week or two of the little ones all to myself, for beach days and picnics and trips to the ice cream stand, Beach Boys blaring out my Jeep's open windows. A favorite thing was to get out our bikes and ride to the village, quite a long ride for very small kids and a winter weary young mom. [2 miles? 3? each way]. We'd get a slice of pizza and an Italian ice then shop at the little beach and surf shop, long gone now. The kids would choose a special summer friendship bracelet, meant to be worn on brown sandy ankles until it fell off in the Fall. Maybe they'd buy a coloring book, or a beach toy.

[quilt in progress is Summertime, by Jan Patek]

And usually we'd get a new kite, once each June. Kites are fun for little kids---until time to reel them in. Many times we'd just snip the kite string and set the kite free instead.

Later the kites became more sophisticated. Colorful nylon, box kites, shark kites. We shopped at fancy kite stores in Provincetown, Hyannis, South Street Seaport. Too costly to discard, I'd patiently wind them in and store them for another summer. I still have a few on my highest kitchen cupboard shelf, I think. And the old wooden kite winder my dad made for me when I was their age.

I sewed a few more circles, missing my mom and dad, and remembering summer days in the Midwest and Cape Cod. My mom and I always had a book we'd read. The back patio was brick, with masses of pink roses on an old blue-green iron fence. After lunch [weird stuff! mushrooms on toast, brie grilled cheese! Salami on white bread,lol.] my brother would head off with the guy-gang for baseball, maybe? and my mother and I would read a chapter of our book. This went well until the summer after third grade, when  we read Little Women, and it wasn't going fast enough for me. I read it myself in a few days. After that it was weekly trips to the library for books of my own.

Evenings----ice cream, fireflies in mayo jars, sunsets that lasted forever.
But not really.

The prompt for Lori's Baskets quiltalong [which I am not doing] is "childhood'' this month. No sewing required, but do you have a special summer memory? I hope so.

love

lizzy

gone to the beach....