Summer

Late in the hot summer afternoon, I sat alternately reading a book and glancing out the nearby window when the automatic sprinklers popped up in the yard and began spraying the grass. The drops danced about the yard, these mingling with those, and all tossing about by the wind. So many memories sprang into my head, popping like little kernels of corn finally reaching their desired temperature and they could not help but burst forward.

My daughters played in our front yard when they were only small toddlers, one of four and the other a little over a year old. They played in the sprinklers then because we didn’t have a pool, and kids have to play in the water on a hot summer day. In the middle of running back and forth over the undulating fountain, Amanda paused.

“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Just peeing,” came her innocent reply. We laugh about it still.

I remember summer days when I was a young girl and my brothers and I walked to the nearby public pool in our town. I walked barefoot, not for lack of footwear, but because it was summer and summer days were meant to be shoeless. The pavement was so hot that I could pop bubbles in the tar of the asphalt with my toes as I walked along. Sometimes I would walk slowly down the steps of the pool, cooling each part of me as I sank lower in the water. But mostly I would jump in feet first, feeling the whoosh of cold all at once. I thought of the story I wrote for Freshman English about those days of my childhood, of not getting a good grade, but enjoying the memory then as much as now.

Then there were the days my daughters and I went to the water park. We had season passes then, because we loved going often. We might stay all day or only for a couple of hours. Audra was still small and used to taking naps. So if we stayed all day, she would lay on a towel in the shade while Amanda and I ate lunch and rested as well. Days of innocence that you can never get back, only visit in memory, on a hot summer afternoon.