Oh Summer!

 

               June is almost over and summer is in full swing.  We’ve had Father’s Day and my older daughter’s birthday and now we’re bearing down on the July 4^th weekend which will likely be noisy with folks lighting off fireworks in the street and in their yards.  Lawn mowers, blowers, power washers and the sounds of road equipment mingle with the voices of children splashing in backyard pools and riding bikes in the heat of the day.  With the daily birdsong, chittering of squirrels and humming of insects flying busily from flower to flower and person to person, these are the elements of the song of summer.  Even the nights are full of sounds with peepers and tree toads, the soft swish of traffic on the highway, crunch of gravel under tires on the side street, and voices floating from patios and open windows as people relax after the heat of the day.

               When I was a kid summer meant days spent mostly outside from morning until bedtime.  Swinging, riding bikes, walking to a friend’s house or to the store with my mother, running through the sprinkler, or reading books for hours laying on a blanket in the shade are all things that filled the hot sunny days.  After dinner was for playing tag or hide and seek with my brothers and cousins, and sipping lemonade on the porch with my family as bugs swarmed around the yellow bulb in the porch light.  I remember one time when a huge bug landed right in the middle of my brother Dan’s belly and my mother said it was June bug, which is a type of very large beetle.  It was brown with shiny hard looking wings and was as large as my father’s thumbnail.  My brother screamed (as did I) and quickly brushed it off his yellow t-shirt.  We used to catch lightning bugs and put them in mayonnaise jars we had punched holes in the lid with nails and filled with some blades of grass and watch them light up the darkness like tiny lanterns later in our rooms.  Of course, if you made the air holes in the lid too big the bugs ended up on your ceiling or window screen because they just crawled out.  I don’t imagine my mother liked it very much when that happened, but I don’t remember her ever mentioning it.  I guess it just came with the territory of raising 4 kids, 3 of whom were boys and teaching them about nature.  Summer nights were filled with the sounds of my father watching TV, the whirring of the window fan, and the peepers’ high pitched singing broken up occasionally by the fire siren and howling dogs.  Our neighbor 2 doors down kept 3 or 4 hunting dogs and boy did they howl when the fire siren went off.  It was an eerie sound in the middle of the night that always gave me a hollow feeling inside.  It seems the summer is never quiet.

               As we move into July and then into August the sounds of summer change, acorns begin to fall from our oak tree onto the driveway and roof in July, crickets begin to sing and locusts and grasshoppers make themselves heard with their nonstop noise that sounds like thousands of tiny wooden beads being shaken together.  I marvel at the songs that nature sings, especially in summer.

Saturday A.M. Nest

I'm usually the first one up on Saturdays and I really love the quiet time. I've made a little nest in the couch corner where, cuddled under a red fleece throw I sip coffee or tea and listen to the music of the birds and house waking up. I also listen to the local station on a small battery powered radio while letting my thoughts run where they will.  Today I was thinking about music and those who have talent enough to create it. I admire people who can use either their voice, or an inanimate object to make pleasant sounds. I tried to make music when I was a kid, not very successfully I'm afraid. In our house you were expected to be in school chorus and church choir, and play a brass instrument. I learned French horn. I even took private lessons. Alas! The music gene did not manifest itself in me! My mother played the piano and had a pleasant soprano singing voice.My three brothers all had and still have good singing voices and all play or played brass instruments well. Two of them hold degrees in music and the other married a music teacher. My husband also sings, has played brass and currently plays bagpipes. My older daughter learned piano, violin, and flute, and still plays on occasion. When I was a freshman in high school I broke my front teeth trying to learn the trumpet for marching band. I then switched to percussion. Let me just say that this girl's got no rhythm. Poor Mr. Taylor, the assistant music teacher was tasked with giving me cymbal lessons. Yes, cymbal lessons. I clearly recall his red face as we sat in a small practice room with him shouting out "one, two, crash, crash, crash, two, crash crash!" cueing me waving his arm in time to the beat. I tried, but somehow I was never quite in time. Poor Mr. Taylor! I wonder if he remembers? I guess that like my father, I play the radio quite well, and that is all. I look at it this way, if everyone is making music, who is there to listen and applaud? I clap quite well; just as long as it doesn't have to be in time to the music. So that's where my mind went this morning. I hope you have a place to snuggle into and allow your mind to roam.

Here's a picture of my radio & my nest.

Telling Stories

 Have you ever had an MRI?  Well, if you are claustrophobic, I suggest finding one of the “open” type because I never thought I was claustrophobic but I have to say that when you realize that for the next 20 minutes you are going to be laying inside a white plastic tube that’s almost pinning your arms down making all kinds of  banging and whirring noises while bombarding your body with magnetic waves, you might just start to feel a tad uneasy!  When I went for the MRI of my back I found myself feeling panicked so to keep my mind off it I kept my eyes tightly shut—it wasn’t dark inside the white tube, it was quite light—and pretended that I was laying outside in the sun and each new banging and whirring sequence was a different kind of animal (squirrel, chipmunk, raccoon, bird, etc.) trying to get into the house through the roof.  I imagined in great detail their little hard hats, reflective vests, tool belts and all their tools.  Everything down to the tiny lunch pails and water bottles they were having on their breaks!  I’m happy to say that they never made it—their tiny tools are not strong enough to break through the shingles on the roof.  Oh, my mind is an interesting place!

I find that having the ability to tell myself a story is a great way to distract myself from unpleasant situations such as having an MRI, or root canal.  I have been making up stories all my life.  Not lying, but just writing stories in my head.  Some of them make it onto paper (or computer now) but there have been so mamy I never wrote down.  My younger brother and I used to take a tape recorder and make up stories with sound effects to entertain ourselves.  I remember at least one of them, not the details, but things that happened while we were taping.   We titled it "The Haunted Volcano", and I was supposed to make the sound of the volcano erupting, except that each time I started to do it we both giggled and giggled instead.  I chuckle now as I think of it.  In another part we wanted to sound of a ghost clanking chains as Jacob Marley did in "A Christmas Carol" so my brother found something outside on the porch.  We were out there taping it when my mother came to see what the noise was and upon seeing Dave with the items we were using yelled "Hey!  Don't ruin that thing!", and Dave replied, "It's a ghost" before we both collapsed in giggles.  I wish I had those tapes, but I doubt they survived.  My brother went on to write and self publish a book of historical fiction, write a sci-fi novel (unpublished), as well as newspaper and magazine articles.  I simply continued writing for my own pleasure and start this blog.

I have some unpleasant things coming up in my near future, and plan to utilize my story telling ability to the max.  If I come up with any that I think would amuse my readers, you can be sure you will find them here!

Summer Memory
A warm sticky summer night and I’m lying in my bed with the little window fan going at full whir until my mother comes in when the air gets cool to turn it off. The cool fan-stirred air felt good after a hot day spent chasing butterflies, playing hide and seek, and riding my bike. It is this scenario that comes to mind on this mid-spring evening of an above average temperature day.
Sometimes I long to go back to those days. Carefree and fun with my biggest worry being whether or not any of my friends or brothers would be around to play with me. I remember hot pleasant days the summer between fourth and fifth grades, which I spent collecting butterflies and assorted other bugs. My father, always ready to build or fix something, used a cardboard box and a piece of screen to build a cage for butterflies. I filled it with grass, a few twigs, and a small jar lid with water in it, and headed across the street to the field in front of my elementary school with my butterfly net. Small yellow, white and brown butterflies were in good supply there, and it wasn’t long before I had one in my net to run across the street with and put in the cage. Once there, I spent time watching it drink some water, and crawl among the grass, occasionally testing out its wings. After a while I’d let it go and repeat the process. I also caught other bugs such as grasshoppers, holding them in my hands for a bit before letting them go. My mother provided me with a large mayonnaise jar for my observations of assorted other bugs. Our neighbor across the street, knowing of my interest in bugs, called me over to his garage one time to see a huge green dragonfly. It was as long as his pointer finger, with beautiful lacy translucent wings. Another time I caught a praying mantis. We kept it for a week or so in a gallon sized jar with holes poked in the lid. We put grass and some twigs in the jar, and my father caught spiders at the factory where he worked and brought them home in Styrofoam coffee cups covered with foil and a rubber band. After dinner, we fed the praying mantis the spiders, taking delight in the triangular head and huge eyes that watched its prey. When the time was right, it would strike out with its arms and capture the spider. I believe it crushed the spider before eating it, but I don’t quite recall that part. When we let the praying mantis go it hung around our yard for a while before flying away. Eventually I grew out of my fascination with insects, but I enjoy the memory of that summer.
Now that I am an adult, a wife, and a mother, we have central air conditioning. We sleep in the summer with the windows closed and the ceiling fans on, but every once in a while I wish for a small window fan whirring away into the night.

Hot Chocolate Memory

HOT CHOCOLATE
By Susan Donald
When I was a kid I spent a week every summer with my grandparents at their farm house in Phillipsburg, NJ. My grandmother, Mama, was a sturdy woman of mixed German and Scotch descent. I was the only daughter of her youngest daughter, who was the youngest of seven children. My oldest brother stayed for 3 weeks, as there were 4 of us and my grandparents could probably only handle 2 of us at a time. The first night of our stay was always a bit teary since I missed my parents very much, as most young children are likely to do. Having had seven children and numerous grandchildren, Mama knew of an excellent way to bridge the gap between tearfully waving at parents and siblings driving away and a peaceful night’s sleep for all. She would take us into the big old farm house kitchen with the circle of a florescent bulb casting a dim yellowish light on the big wooden table and make us some hot chocolate. Not the instant kind, the kind where you heat the milk in a sauce pan on the stove and then stir in the chocolate and sugar before pouring the delicious liquid into a mug. Then she’d get out a box of graham crackers and we’d talk and munch waiting for the cocoa to cool enough to sip without burning our lips. By the time we were finished, we had nearly forgotten about how much we missed our family and were looking forward to the week ahead, filled with lazy days playing by the creek, rolling down the grassy hill, card games, and feeding the black birds crusts of bread each night after dinner. There must have been a hundred of them. The lawn would be covered with them eating the bread and then they would take off as one forming a large black cloud as they noisily returned to the trees. I have never forgotten the healing power of hot chocolate.
When my oldest daughter was about 9 years old, I felt like she needed some prompting to talk to me about whatever was bothering her, and to get her homework done. I took to making us mugs of hot chocolate and just sitting across the table from each other. There is something about that which makes things cozy and invites confidences. It was with this comfort in mind that I packed up a dozen home made sugar cookies and a couple of packets of hot chocolate and tucked them into my daughter’s bag as she was leaving to return to college. Hot chocolate can really help make things cozy and homey.