Summertime
By Foy Valentine, Founding Editor
Summertime is the best time of the year.
At least that`s my take on it.
I was born in July, you know. So when the sun is really bearing down, the weather by day and by night is hot as blazes, and even the trees seem ready to lie down and pant, then everything seems to me to be in place just as it ought to be and "God`s in his heaven: All`s right with the world," as Robert Browning had Pippa, the quintessential Pollyana, to say.
No other season has such a wonderfully high-class song written about it: "That Good Old Summertime."
No other season is associated so warmly (get it?) with such a kaleidoscope of pleasant memories, particularly from childhood.
And no other season can claim such a wide and varied and exciting menu of lovely things to do, lovely places to go, and lovely fresh things to eat.
Consider ten especially good things about the summertime.
School Is Out. Whee! This is great for kids. They have been cooped up for nine interminable months and deserve the break. Teachers deserve a breather, too. When one college professor was asked what he liked best about his profession, he answered, "Three things: June, July, and August." Boys can go barefooted. Girls can spread out their dolls and play to their hearts` content. I have known one youngster, who later became a top-flight electrical engineer, who, when school was out, regularly climbed up in his favorite tree and read book after book after book through the summer.
Vacations. In asking friends and family, grandchildren, and neighbors what they liked best about the summertime, I got more votes for vacations than anything else. People like trips. We crave the open road. We relish the prospect of change, of new scenes, of new restaurants, of new places to picnic, and of making new acquaintances who could become new friends. Farmers like to slow down and relax in the knowledge that the crops are laid by. Frenchmen rush headlong like migrating wildebeests to distant watering holes. Urbanites flee from their cities. Country people head for theme parks. Kids who can, go to camps. Church choirs do their annual junkets. Preachers warm over their old sermons for the congregations are mostly gone anyway and won`t be back until after Labor Day.
Family Time. The other seasons of the year seem so everlastingly filled with things to do that family time easily gets left to the last and then left out. Summer permits better priorities. Families travel together, go to see kinfolks together, go fishing together, watch Fourth of July fireworks together, make ice cream together, do watermelon cuttings together, watch summer sunsets together, search the night skies for falling stars together, and enjoy family cookouts together. This family togetherness is for me one of the very best things about summertime.
Catching Up. During the other seasons of the year, things get put off. Reasonably important things get postponed so that attention can be focused on the most pressing things. Stuff requiring research, or reflection, or long distance telephone calls, or personal conferences get put in fat folders and pushed to a far side of the desk. Regular maintenance of all the machinery gets neglected and the squeaky wheel gets the grease. But summertime allows us to catch up, tie up the loose ends, and work through those stacks and files, doing those things that have to be done and throwing away those things whose deadlines have already passed. When summer`s longer days and less hectic schedules allow us to clean off our desks, tidy up our garages, make those long delayed visits, and do those necessary runs to the hardware stores, we are rewarded with a warm and fuzzy feeling of achievement and inner peace. Thank the Lord for summer`s provision of the chance to catch up.
Summer Sounds. Katydids, bullfrogs, hoot owls, whippoorwills, mockingbirds, and quails with their audaciously bold and emphatically clear bobwhite calls are among the marvelous symphonists of summertime. The softer sounds of summer breezes and hummingbirds, and turtledoves with their gently plaintive cooing are also wonderfully memorable. (By the way, did you know that "turtle" is the very old Old English word for "dove" so that we have the King James Version of the Song of Solomon 2:12 rendered, "the voice of the turtle is heard in our land") My own boyhood days on the farm were close to many sounds that seem now to be especially identified with the summertime: roosters crowing, hens clucking, chicks cheeping, guineas potracking, horses whinnying, cows mooing, and pigs squealing to signal that they knew it was feeding time-grunting contentedly when stretched out in the sun to be benignly scratched in the side with a handy corn cob in the hand of a kindly human.
Summer Flowers. Vivid colors, glorious blossoms, and exquisite aromas are all part of the show. There are a couple of marvelously fragrant roses in my own small rose garden now whose heady perfumes are enough to make a body walk sideways. The big magnolia tree`s abundance of fantastic blooms that permeated the area around my upstairs bedroom where I slept until I went away to college is still vividly clear in my memory. Honeysuckles, of course, are commonplace but nonetheless appreciated. Trumpet vine blossoms, irises, zinnias, gardenias, lilacs, begonias, the clematis with its extravagant display of big and bold bright purple blossoms, mandevilla, impatiens, and crape myrtle all have unique niches to fill in a salute to summer flowers. One of my all-time favorites is a glorious field of blue gentians growing wild in unfettered profusion in a great open meadow at 9,000 feet altitude in the Sangre de Christo Mountains near Red River, Mexico. Exquisite.
Summer Games. Baseball, of course, takes the cake. But softball, basketball, volleyball, and now soccer all have their special devotees. Touch football also draws its partisans into happy competition when a few friends have congregated and are physically able to run for a pass and then race, lumber, or lope for the back fence. Hide-and-go-seek is universally embraced and is best done in the summertime at dusk when the daylight is still lingering and the shadows of approaching night offer splendid places to crouch and avoid detection. My beloved wife of 57 years and I are happily content after supper with a rousing game of Scrabble as the summer sun sinks toward a glorious sunset seen from our west-facing picture window fades peacefully into night.
Summer Gardens. Fresh vegetables and fresh fruits are in. They deserve a ten-gun salute. Oh, I know about modern air-conditioned grocery stores with their produce flown in by refrigerated cargo planes from Chile and Australia and New Zealand and Israel and Costa Rica; and I am not ungrateful for this semi-fresh fare. The truth is, however, that these offerings cannot hold a candle to honestly vine ripened tomatoes, fresh corn pulled this morning, new potatoes, today`s cutting of okra, sweet cantaloupes left on the vine until they are a solid sun-blessed yellow, and a ripe watermelon with a nice, green proving that this morning it happily nestled on the vine in its own watermelon patch. Furthermore, summer is, as far as I can determine, the God-ordained time to eat homemade fresh peach ice cream. Scraping the dasher is about as close as mortals are likely to get to the Elysian Fields of the Greek gods. Grilling out, moreover, is most happily done in the summertime. Whether the offering is chicken or hamburgers, steaks or wieners, ribs or shrimp, or marinated pork tenderloin. All offer special taste treats. My very best is pork chops slowly grilled to a golden brown with nothing added but a little salt and pepper and then gently enhanced with all beef wieners also slowly grilled until split open by the heat, right down the middle.
Summer Nights. A walk outside in the cool of the evening is an unforgettable experience on a summer night. The stars are twinkling, a blazing meteor can be an occasional serendipity, and a distant bank of thunder heads illuminated now and then by sheet lightening are all noteworthy. Summer fireflies work a magic of their own. Then it is nearly heavenly on a summer night to go to bed with the windows open so as to relish a pleasant south breeze coming through a nearby magnolia with its uniquely heady perfume embracing you as you drift off into lala land.
Summer Porching. (I am indebted to my friend Kyle Childress, pastor of the Austin Heights Baptist Church in Nacogdoches, Texas, for enabling me to name this delicious experience. He credits a friend from Louisville, Kentucky for giving him the name when he presented him with "a copy of a small coffee-table style book" called Porching: A Humorous Look at America`s Favorite Pastime by John H. Buchino, M.D., Professor of Pediatrics and Pathology at the University of Louisville School of Medicine.) To sit on the front porch and watch the world go by has to be one of summer`s finest bequeathments to today`s weary pilgrims. Especially after a hard morning`s physical work and a hasty midday meal, a spell of porching can be just what the doctor ordered. A quick nap on a porch pallet can put icing on this cake. Another plus for porching is the rocking chair, for a little rocking can be our equivalent of what certain Hindu holy men do when they sit cross-legged on a tow sack and chant, "Om, Om, Om, Om" on and on. Although porching is something that has turned my motor over for as long as I can remember, now that I am in my really mature years, it has taken on a new aura of wondrous attraction. Please join me. I think it is not really necessary but you could ask your doctor if porching is right for you.
Why should these reflections about the good things of summertime have to end with ten? Just because God gave us ten digits on the ends of our arms, I suppose. Actually, there are many more reasons for saluting the summer season. I have written this less than scholarly treatise on the longest day of the year, however, and this is a reminder that all good things come to an end. Tomorrow the days will start getting shorter. Before we can catch our breaths, autumn will have come. Then the frosts will start. Then winter`s icy grip will take hold. That will be the time to start looking toward spring. Then, presto, there will come once again "that good old summertime."
