You Know It's Summer When . . .

DEBS: Sitting on my deck last weekend, I heard the first cicada of the season. A sure sign of summer here in Texas. (We've had hummingbirds and fireflies since early April.) That started me thinking about all the sensory triggers that we associate with the changing of seasons, things that for most of us go back to our childhood.

The drone of cicadas. The tinny melody of the ice cream truck (Creepy. Gave me nightmares.) The prickly feel of junebugs when you catch them in your hands. Crape myrtles in bloom. Tomatoes and corn and cantalope on the fruit and vegetable stands.

And the smells! Meat cooking on grills. Chlorine from swimming pools. Coppertone or Sea-and-Ski suntan lotion (unmistakeably different,) the damp scent of sprinklers running in the evening . . .

But for me, I realized that the one thing that shouts SUMMER IS HERE is the smell of a burning mosquito coil.

My dad was a manufacturer's rep for theater concessions, and along with popcorn, popcorn boxes, and drink cups, he sold PIC mosquito coils to drive-in theater chains. We always had the little dark green coils on their metal stands burning on our patio in the evenings.

These days, they are made by OFF and come with nice little clay pots that keep you from stepping on them and burning your feet. Nice improvements, but they still smell exactly the same, and I love it. (They do actually repel mosquitoes, by the way.)

So, Jungle Reds and dear readers, for our Saturday list:

What's the thing that lets you know "it's summer when . . ."

JAN: When I have to add a hat, wristband, sunglasses, and towel to my tennis bag.

RHYS: Back in England it was the smell of new mown grass and the thwack of a cricket ball. Here in California it's the reappearance of the fog creeping over the hills from the ocean. I wish we had warm lazy evenings, but we don't. But the sound of happy kids coming up from the swimming pool at the bottom of my hill is a sure sign summer is here.

HANK: Oh, Coppertone, of course! And Bain de Soleil, the gooey orange stuff. And even the fragrance of baby oil, back in the day. Where we live now, the ice cream guy--his chimes playing ONLY and INCESSANTLY The Entertainer--arrives precisely at 5pm, which is a silly time for a popsicle. But it's so nice to be sitting in the back yard by the pool, and hear that tune. It's completely summer. Jonathan and I get blow-up rafts, and float around on the pool with books and iced tea. Now THAT is summer, and you are all invited.

The peonies arrive! Tomatoes and Basil! And we change to gin and tonics. (Diet tonic water, highly recommended.) And flip flops! (Of which I have too many--cf yesterday's guilty pleasures.)

DEBS: OMG! Can you believe we actually put baby oil on our skin???? And now we live in 50 sunscreen. The days of innocence. . . .


JULIA: Mmm, yes, new mown grass. Catapults me straight back to my early teens. The smell of river water and pine tar when we swim in the Saco. The sound of thunder and rain pounding on the roof (why is it a sodden downpour in November sounds entirely different from a drenching in June?) Lately, with our own and our friends' children graduating, the sentimental strains of "Pomp and Circumstance." Then, of course, the sound of parents discretely weeping into tissues and handkerchiefs!

The most significant summer smell for me is the delicious aroma of hamburgers on the bbq. Ross grills several times a week in the summer, on a rickety old thing that's held together with duct tape and prayers. I don't particularly care for hamburgers from restaurants or fast-food joints, but I'd eat Ross's hot-off-the-charcoal burgers every dinner between Memorial Day and Labor Day, if I could.

ROBERTA: Oh that reminds me, Julia, corn on the cob. And tomatoes that taste like tomatoes, not mealy paste. And Tonka gets so hot we have to take him in for a haircut.

HANK: Debs, are you sure those green coils aren't toxic? We use them all the time, but I always wonder.

HALLIE: Soft shell crab (just cooked it this week). YES, tomatoes that smell spicy sweet and leave that smell on your hands. Fresh herbs--I'm growing sage, chive, basil, and oregano. Apricots and cherries and peaches and plums. And melons that smell sickly sweet. And, to repeat, freshly cut grass. And the smell of my little compost heap, starting to heat up. And the skunk sauntering through our backyard at dusk.

DEBS: Rhys, I'm convinced that new-mown grass smells different in England than in Texas. Here it just makes us sneeze . . .

Hank, I think it's a law that all ice cream trucks MUST play The Entertainer:-) And we may all take you up on the G&Ts and floating in the pool. With books. And Ross's burgers. And tomatoes with fresh basil and mozzarella.

How much better can it get?

In the Good Old Summertime!

I remember summer well. It was a time with no structure and no commitments. I played alone in our orchard, building a tree house, making a trapeze on a big apple tree and pretending I was Patsy of the Circus (my current favorite heroine). I remember that I used to do some pretty amazing stunts on that trapeze. I never fell off either, because Patsy never fell off.

On other days I'd go with my friends into the woods and we'd play exciting cops and robbers type of games. Sometimes I'd go off on my bike, find a stream and catch tiddlers and minnows in a jar. Summer days seemed to stretch on with no end. Sitting on the bank of the stream, warm sun on my back, eating a cheese and pickle sandwich and fruit from out trees was just perfect.

It still sounds perfect now. Every summer I say to myself that I'm going to take time off to chill out, to sit in the shade with a book and a cool drink. And what happens--I look up one day and it is September and the summer has slipped away.

Of course I know the world has changed. My daughters can't let their children go off for the day on their bikes. You'd never let ten year olds play in the woods without adult supervision. But I deeply regret it. We've taken from our children the time of wonder and creativity and imagination. Instead we've filled their summers with structure. They go to tennis camp and swim camp and computer camp, and play dates are arranged. But they rarely have the luxury of planning their own time, going where they please, stopping when they feel like it and coming home when they are tired.

I think my summers helped make me the writer I am today. I lived a lot of that time in the world of my imagination. I became observant of tiny details as i watched nature around me. I became resiliant as I fell from a tree, trying to hammer a plank for my tree house, scratched my knees, cleaned myself up and climbed back up. Now that I'm a grown up I'm hardly ever bored. I can always think of something I'd like to do. I can take myself off and wanter a strange city without feeling scared that I'll get lost.

I'm off to UK and France on Sunday. At least some of that time I plan to wander through the woods, sit by a river bank and maybe even catch tiddlers in a jar. I wonder if you can go home again?

JAN: For the most part, my kids tried, but resisted camps because they needed that time of no-structure. One camp-less summer my son learned to play guitar from a CD-set I bought him, and now he's an awesome guitarist (lessons later, of course) with a band that actually makes good money at his college. So all that downtime definitely helped make him who he is today.

There's some movement out of Manhattan that's working hard to convince parents that kids don't need all the 24-hour security and supervision that we think they do. That our perceptions of the risks is distorted by the news and that perception is actually hurting kids. But I do sympathize -- and its not like I was brave enough to let my kids wander as much as they should have.

HALLIE: The problem for most parents is that free time for kids means the parents need to be free, too - when I was working summers there was no choice but camp, But I believe in teaching kids to fend for themselves. We taught them to take the T in and out of Boston, to read a street and subway map, to figure out how to get home from wherever they were. I'd never send them off alone, but with a small group of friends, I always felt Harvard Square in the evening, watching the buskers, was far safer than dropping them at the mall.

ROBERTA: We lived in a neighborhood full of kids and we all bombed around together on our bikes, playing games and making forts. No lessons, no camps, nothing structured at all. But Hallie's right--the parents have to be around to make this work. My mother was a teacher so she could be a home base when (and if!) we needed one. I think it's partly that the times have changed and are a little more scary, but it's also a sense that kids will miss out if their schedules are not crammed with planned activities. I'm like Rhys--never, ever bored and I credit those days of summer for that!

RO: Oh, I thought this post was going to be about that great old Judy Garland movie..

Growing up in Brooklyn, it was all about the beach. Brighton Beach, Manhattan Beach, Riis Park, Rockaway and Coney Island. Baby oil and iodine and sun reflectors. God, how we abused our skin! And our bodies...eating knishes and thick cut fries cooked in oil that was probably the same oil they used to cook the fries my parents ate when they went to Coney.
When we got older it was going to the mountains or the country. If you lived in Brooklyn, Manhattan was "the city" and the Catskills were "the mountains" or "the country." There were no other mountains. I didn't catch tiddlers. My mother had me vaccinated.;-)

HANK: Summer--didn't it use to last forever? We'd go to the library, and get ten books, the limit, and I'd bring them home and curl up in the special place in the big tree in the back yard and devour them. Or sometimes I'd read in the hayloft in the barn.
We had shows on the back porch, my sisters and me. I remember, "Dancing to 88 Keys" was one title I somehow came up with. We'd wear costumes, like big crinolines over our shorts, and pretend to be performers.
We'd take picnics down to the creek, riding our ponies, and read by the water.
And oh, yes, when we were older: Iodine and baby oil. Yikes.
Popsicles! That you could break in two. And MAD magazine.
Every year we'd take a big family vacation: to Jackson Hole, or Scottsdale, or, locally, Lake Maxinkuckee, where there was a very cool military school with incredibly cute cadets. We loved that..

RHYS: This post is evoking more and more summer memories. The summer my kids joined kids from the block and put on a circus. They practised for days and actually were pretty good although the dogs wouldn't perform as ordered with frilly skirts on. My daughter Jane goes with her family and friends to a cabin by a lake for a week each year. Although it's really simple my granddaughters Lizzie and Meghan look forward to it for months. It has become their private world with rituals repeated each summer. Now that's my kind of summer...
So what are your favorite summer memories?