Summertime Blues

---

I remember that last Day of school, the anticipation of the bell, riding home on the bus with oversized folders stuffed with all my drawings and various assignments from the year, feeling the abundance and promise of the summer ahead of me.

One week into the summer, I had settled into a routine of watching reruns of I Love Lucy back-to-back every morning until my mother told me to turn off the TV and go outside.

The driveway had been repaved with fresh tar. I watched the steam rise from it picked sticky little cinders off the bottoms of my shoes.

I remember hitting a tennis ball again the garage door again over and over and over and over. Bored, bored, bored, bored.

The rock garden in the backyard was filled with pansies and snapdragons and real

spearmint. You could put it in your mouth, but it didn’t taste the same as the gum.

I remember trying to balance our terrier on the tire swing hanging from a tree limb, but

she wouldn’t stay.

The rusty metal swing set made a creaking sound, and you had to be careful on the

swing at the end because it would start swinging a bit sideways and you would

eventually hit the pole on the end.

I set up grocery store inside a gray playhouse with white trim, painted in the exact same

colors as our real house. I carefully arranged the plastic food and paper money in a

box, but no one came to shop.

I rode my purple bicycle around the cul de sac with a basket full of rocks and feathers.

I would go back inside at around at 2:00 pm to find my mom on the couch, watching

General Hospital, with her coffee and cigarettes on the table in front of her.

The floor of my bedroom was strewn with Barbie Dolls and their assorted accessories,

coloring books, LightBrite, Etch-a-Sketch, and an EZ Bake Oven. I lined up dozens of

stuffed animals up on the bed to play school and I got to be the teacher.

On week 2, I was signed up for day camp at the local park, making God’s Eyes and

leather bracelets and a ceramic owl until mom picked me up around noon.

We would usually stop at the A&P on the way home, and I would beg for a quarter so that I could put it in one of those machines that dispensed troll dolls in little plastic bubbles.

By week 3, my parents had reactivated their swimming pool membership. I remember

long afternoons there, eating banana popsicles and jumping off the diving board, until

we heard thunder in the distance and had to leave. The sound of the baseball game

was always playing in the background on the radio.

My mom would start making dinner every afternoon at 4:00. I remember the smell of

ground beef and onion powder and how it would always turn my stomach.

If the rain cooled it down enough, we would eat dinner on the brick patio, under the

green awning that was torn at the corners. We had an enormous white serving platter,

and little plastic knobs shaped like ears of corn with sharp spikes on the end, and I

would use them to hold on to the corn while I rolled it back and forth through a cube of

butter. I was much harder to eat when I was missing my front teeth.

I remember biting down on cherry tomatoes that tasted as sweet as candy, and how

they would pop and squirt in your mouth when bit down on them. I would spit

watermelon seeds onto the ground and wonder if they would become a watermelon

tree.

Sometimes we would make homemade ice cream in a wooden contraption that had to

be cranked by hand for hours. Once I got impatient and reached in to taste the rock salt

around it.

The lightning bugs started to appear at dusk, sparking up, then disappearing in the

darkness. I remember catching a few and putting them in the Mason Jar with some

grass to make a bed and asked my father to poke some holes in the lid. By morning,

they were dead.

I remember the sound of the air conditioner humming and the air thick with bugs,

thousands of them under the street light, and thinking, “I must be breathing that.”

I remember that feeling of deep grief that would sink in at bedtime every night, crying

silently in bed because I didn’t want the day to end, didn’t want summer to be over.

But there were still 7 more weeks to go….