You may remember that at the end of last week's column I wondered what girls did. Wellsir, a good friend told me so i asked her to tell you. We have a guest writer this week and I know you will enjoy it - especially the “girls."
After reading Chelsea's recent column about his summertime memories, I started reminiscing about my own childhood summers. I blame him, because he closed his column by saying that he didn't know what girls did during the summer. My first thought was that we weren't that much different from boys!
That, at least, was my perspective growing up in a small south central Oklahoma community. The highlights of my summer included going barefooted (an occasion made even more special since it was STRICTLY forbidden by my mother prior to May first), riding my bike, playing in my sandbox with my sister (we specialized in layered cakes made of sand in our tiny metal cake pans; they were topped with a gooey “mud" glaze!), playing on my swingset, and playing “house" in a small storage room behind our garage.
Having a sister three years younger guaranteed a built-in playmate, and although we did our fair share of squabbling, we usually figured out how to get along after making twenty-hundred trips inside the house for a cold drink, to tattle on one another, to get something we forgot, etc., etc., until the constant slamming of the screen door would encourage my mother to banish us outside until suppertime.
When I got a little older, an additional summer highlight was attending church camp! It never failed to be an awesome adventure...would we get the best bunks? (we almost always did...right in front of the water cooler!)...whom would I meet? (a cute boy from another church somewhere in OK?)...what would this year's crafts be? (remember those braided potholders and leather-punch keychains?) Never a dull moment!
But probably the ultimate highlight of my early summers was when my cousins came to visit in the summer.
My Granny had three siblings. One sister followed in her daddy's footsteps and became a preacher; she never married or had kids. My grandparents had one son, my dad; my uncle and his wife had one son, and my other aunt had seven sons!! A few of them had ended up in the OKC area; most of my aunt's branch ended up in Arizona or points west.
Every summer for many years, some combination of those nine grandsons and their families would visit OK. My sister and I lived for these visits because they had kids around our age. We always managed to talk our parents into letting us stay at our grandparent's house out in the country when they were all visiting.
I've never quite figured out how they housed twenty-plus people in that two bedroom, one bath house, but I know that we kids slept outside in the back of relative's vans or pickup campers.
No AC back then, and just those tiny camper windows to let in a whisper of a breeze. We'd lie there sweating, laughing and talking late into the night. Our meals were monstrous affairs, and we had our mother's stern admonition that “we were to help Granny"...translation: do the dishes after every meal, and get up and start doing them without being asked! This was the “bargaining chip" my mother used when we would cajole her to let us stay...and it always worked!! They had no dishwasher, and I guess paper plates hadn't been invented yet. It seemed to take two hours to wash all those plates, glasses, silverware, and cast iron skillets!
Once we were free from kitchen duty, we'd head down the road to pick berries, or hang out talking for hours in my grandparent's hayloft. (although why we picked the hottest place in the world for our hangout, I'll never know!) In the evening, even more relatives who had been working during the day would show up. We'd sit out in the yard, sprawled on the grass scratching our assorted chigger or mosquito bites, listening to the grownups talk.
This was how we got to know our relatives who died before we were born, or when we were very little. If the talk got too boring, we'd play freeze tag, or catch fireflies, or play kick the can.
Sometimes there'd be ice-cold watermelon, or hand-cranked homemade ice cream. We kids always had to sit on the freezer while someone cranked. A cold bottom was totally worth the reward of that ice cream much later! If we happened to end up inside, there were countless games of Wahoo, dominoes or Yahtzee to entertain us!
Best summer memories ever, and some of my favorite cousins STILL because of those summer visits together!