LONGING FOR SUMMER'S PAST

When you have the longer winters in New Hampshire you think a lot about the coming warmer months of summer. I currently have my seed catalogs on the coffee table, and I am plotting out this year’s garden. Now that I have been in my house close to two years come June, I know how annuals and perennials requiring less sun are better in the front yard. The plants that need full sun will blossom greatly in the rock garden out back. This past summer I was gifted with appearances of perennials making their comeback as if to reintroduce themselves once again like a lost friend that has returned. The mass of weeds that held so many surprises had been built up over the years, the rock garden finally cleared, a clean slate except for these perennials that held strong from the past. The past I had only seen in and old photo album left behind in the attic of this once great glorious garden. I also brought along some rose bushes from my old house and added some plants bought from local nurseries and farm stands this last summer. I hope they made it through the winter in their new home.

Summer also holds my most vivid memories of childhood. I have written about before, my visits to Northern Canada in the summer. Off to explore with my cousins into the hills that led to the mountain, that I could never quite climb. So many things distracting us along the way as children and the long walk, a few miles up into the hills at the base. There was a herd of wild horses that ran freely through the town during the summer months. One time they trampled down my grandmother’s picket fence and they regularly caused havoc in the town. I can remember from where my grandmother lived, I would go out each morning and stand on the top of her stairs out back and gaze around the village. From there you could see just about everywhere in the town, and where the herd might be that day. Sometimes, tiny specs off to the end of the cove, miles away the pack, huddled and grazing. Then the next day they would be just a few doors down having knocked someone else’s fence over to get to the grass in that yard. Also, from the back of the house were the waterfalls, just a few yards away from the stairs and root cellar. The roar of the falls was loud at first to get used to, but by nightfall comforting enough to lull you to sleep in the old feather bed I slept in. The dampness of a typical cold Newfoundland morning in August wore off to a warm sunny day. My cousins and I would try to jump and climb over the rushing water to gather wild blueberries without slipping into the falls. The blueberry bushes scattered throughout the rocks. I had never seen anything so powerful and colorful in one place. Clear rushing water over the shale stone with flecks of pyrite and quartz in tiny bits, catching the sunlight that shimmered from them. Different shades of green moss from wet to dry, the fat, juicy wild blueberries that hung from the small but leafy branches. We would head up the road to a Fish & Chips stand after that, but I would only eat the chip’s though, sprinkling the malt vinegar on them. If it was too hot, we’d head over to the pond by the main road for a swim. There would be afternoon English tea, with my grandmother in a lovely bone china teacup. The woodsy smell of the woodstove from the night before when it was heated. Looking out the kitchen window to the harbor. watching the boats and puffins fly and dive into the water. And on a couple of those occasions the fog, a dark, slow rolling cloudy mist. A foreboding force that I had never seen before. It was so thick and eerie like looking at a scary movie you could not escape from, but I was tucked safely in my Grandmother’s house.

Summers in my neighborhood where I grew up was playing with friends, barefoot, peeling honeysuckles from the vine to get the nectar. There were woods by my house where I grew up and old Native Indigenous burial grounds that had been there years before they were desecrated, and bodies removed for new housing developments in the post World War II. As I child I did not understand or appreciate the significance of what was done, only that the streets had Indian names, as did some of the schools in my town and the towns around us, that no one that was not local could pronounce. My friends and I were warned by our parents to stay out of there, but it was easy to slip away. There were wildflowers to be picked, the best places for hide and seek, big thick vines to swing from the trees, and hoping when you ran through there, you would not trip and fall into one of the grave holes that were poorly filled in. As an adult I am horrified to what was done to the original people of the island, but as child of seven or eight, it was a place to roam and discover and not seen as a graveyard though it was. In those summer months there were bike rides, beach days, roller skating, walks to a nearby horse farms to pet the horses. There were a few in our neighborhood before even more homes were to be built and the farms sold off. Street games of hopscotch jump rope, romper stompers, skip ball, days filled with plenty of sunshine. The ice cream truck that came by in the afternoons that we eagerly awaited, or swimming after lunch in a neighbor’s pool or the sprinkler, when the sun was its hottest in the afternoon. On the street where I lived, in your yard, you might find turtles, frogs and the occasional garden snake. I was never scared of the snakes though, their underbellies the most beautiful shade of blue, prettier than the sky. Occasionally, you might see an escaped horse from one of the farms run by. It seemed so easy, innocent, climbing trees or attending the library reading club to see how many books you could read that summer for the party in August. Because we lived on an island the fog trucks for mosquitos would come by, they would spray big puffy clouds of white so enticing to us as kids to chase and be lost in those clouds. Those big puffy cotton balls that were filled with pesticides that we inhaled into our lungs and pores. I often wonder the damage it might have done and again horrified that we did those things. Every kid asking their Mom for a glass jar to catch fireflies in the evening and staying out past dark to till the stars twinkled bright as the streetlights it seemed in the distance. It was time to go home when your parents called you even though you’d asked for fifteen more minutes.

I think of all the things I did the freely as a child in Canada and on Long Island. After having my own children, the world had changed so much. Never to roam around the neighborhood, or town as I did back then, just safely in our fenced in backyard or at a friend’s house..

I have no bad memories of summer that I can recall. I do not have many dreams that I remember, except the ones of summer. A single droplet from the honeysuckle to my tongue, that is perfumy and sweet. The smell of fresh cut grass is strong and the feeling of softness beneath my bare feet. The bells jingling on the ice cream truck, the white crisp uniform on the ice cream man. The sound of crickets chirping as background music as I chase a neighborhood kid in a game of tag as the sun sets. My senses feel overpowered at the ocean where much of my youth was spent. At the beach I collect shells, jump waves, and build sandcastles. The scent of suntan lotion mixed with sweat and salt air is happy and familiar.

The sound of rushing water out back, a particular type of wood that burns, it smells warm and cozy. Dust and dirt from the unpaved roads that envelops me as a car drives past, I am hiking into the hills to try to climb that mountain. I wipe the dirt away from my eyes but feel the dust still stuck to my hair. I am stepping out of the darkness into a misty overcast sky from a barn in the yard of my grandmother’s home. It is now empty of the farm animals that once resided there, but there is still the earthy smell of dried hay remnants inside. I come around to the side of the little red barn and follow the sound of a horn. I see it, a fishing vessel rippling the water into the harbor, and stirring the calm with now whitecaps behind it. A sound of a foghorn breaking the almost silence of its arrival. The wind has picked up and the salt air blowing in. My hair is damp and salty, but the air is fresh and clean, and I inhale all that is good and remembered in summers of my past.