Time to Write

Summer was always fun, if you discount when I was learning to ride a bike.  I still have coal imbedded in my knees from the driveway. Forgetting that, all sorts of culinary delights were available, most within a mile or two.  We had 100 acres and on those lands were bountiful treasures.  One I was mentioning to a friend yesterday was wild strawberries.  Those tiny ones that my sister in Vermont told me have sprung up everywhere on her lawn and fields this year.  They are almost goneby now, but I would have loved to taste them!  This list is long, so bear with me or just delete!  We had red raspberries, black raspberries, cultivated huge blackberries, currants, gooseberries, choke cherries, Concord grapes, a Transparent and Macintosh apple orchard and of course the vegetable garden.  

Going out to the garden, yanking a carrot out of the dirt, wiping it off on your jeans and eating it right there, a rare treat indeed.  The availability of food wasn’t the only treat.  I mentioned in another post that the feel of bare feet in green grass or hard packed dirt roads was one of my favorite things.   Building dams in the brook with mugs from the sides was great fun.

Haying, although probably not my dad’s favorite, was fun work for us as kids.  Playing in the haybarn was special, too, because the barn was an intriguing adventure.  We played hide and seek and I still have dreams of the secret doors, passages, and cubby holes in that barn.  The barns no longer exist today, but I can picture them perfectly. 

In springtime we would boil sugar maple sap in a long rectangular metal box.  I don’t know the name, I just know that in the summer it was placed in the yard and filled with the hose.  Voila!  A swimming pool!  I was a spoiled child for sure….

Time To Write: Summer