summer

Hot as the Dickens

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This week promises to be into the 90s, with growing humidity.  Just thinking about it makes me remember hot summer days when I was a little girl and a not so little girl.

I never even heard about air-conditioning when I was a little girl.  If anyone told me I would think that was make-believe, or something only rich people had.

We had fans.  Fans that we propped up in windows to cool us down at night.

I shared a bedroom with Deanna and Bonita.  Deanna wanted the fan to blow out because that would pull all the hot air out of the room.  I believed the fan could blow the sound of crickets and frogs over me, along with the smell if lilacs and peonies or fresh cut hay; whatever was out there.

Bonita never said a word because that would mean she had to take sides so she just stayed quiet like she never even thought about it.

Together we compromised.  Each day one of us got to choose.  Bonita had to keep track so she didn’t get on anyone’s bad side:  one time facing in; the next time she got to choose, facing out.

Sometimes avoiding something is way more work than just sticking your neck out and blurting out an opinion.  Anyways, I hardly ever stopped myself from blurting stuff out.  Mostly because I didn’t think about it until it was too late.

Seems like time slowed down on super-hot days in the summer.

I could just lounge around all day long and read one of my Weekly Reader Book of the Month books. Of course, I couldn’t really do that on account of chores to do, like weed the garden and hang clothes on the line and teach my cow, Ladybird, how to walk like a show cow, stopping her front feet right together and her back feet with one back and one forward, so her udder showed the best way possible. On super-hot days, me and Ladybird took a break from training.

This is Bonita and me getting Ladybird ready for the big 4-H show.

Hanging clothes wasn’t so bad, cuz they started out cool and wet.  Sometimes it seemed like they got dry before I even got a load up, but I never took them down until the whole four lines got filled and dried and Mom said I had to, cuz that meant another job:  folding clothes.

Deanna liked to get some sort of board game going, like Monopoly.  Nancy, from across the road came over, and Tommy next door, and sometimes Diane and Mike from down the road.  Lots of kids playing Monopoly meant the game lasted forever and a day. That got super-boring.

Sometimes we played card games like Spoons, I Doubt It, and Oh Hell but we changed the name to “Oh Heck,” so we didn’t have to go to confession. That’s before I learned about wooden swearing and before I knew it was just as bad to say a word that meant the same thing as “Hell,” and maybe even worse cuz you were trying to pull one over on God.

I never told my blood-sister, Connie, about wooden swearing, so she kept on saying “fishy damn” instead of “dam it.” I figured I’d just let sleeping dogs lie on account of one rule I really liked about sinning: You have to know it’s a sin and do it anyway. I figured if Connie never knew about wooden swearing, she could “heck,””fishy dam,” “shoot,” and “fudge” up a storm and God could just tell the devil, “Sorry dude, she didn’t know.”

Mostly, we played outside cuz mothers didn’t like kids in the house. Sometimes we had pogo stick contests or hula hoop contests. Nancy was super good at hula hooping.

If the day was so hot we could hardly move, we waited until nighttime to play outside cuz by then things started to cool off and all those chores took up time during the day. Night’s when we played Piggy in My Pen. Another game that can last forever. Or at least until bedtime.

Piggy in My Pen is sorta like Hide and Go Seek, except instead of saying “1-2-3 on Bonita,” you say, “Bonita’s in my pen.” After that, Bonita had to stay in my pen, which was the boxelder tree, until she got a signal from another Piggy. The game didn’t end until all the pigs got caught. Which most nights was never.

That’s me with our dog, Bingo. Bonita’s got one of our cats. It looks like Deanna just got all our tennis shoes off the line.

The day is already on its way to being a scortcher. The air-conditioning is on. I have chores to do. The first thing I need to do is finish the edging around the flower beds and along the curb. After that, I’ll be inside reading and working on my next novel, working title May His Tribe Increase.

What will you be doing in this heat?

I just want a Hoola-Hoop

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When I was a little girl, Hula hoops were a new thing.  Everyone had one. Pretty soon everyone knew how to hoopla hoop.

I had to practice and practice.  My belly ached from trying, but I figured if Deanna could do it, so could I. I had to practice outside, cuz hula hoops are outside toys, not for crashing around inside with and knocking over precious things or decapitating stuff. Outdoors had lots of obstacles, too, like little kids underfoot, and mosquitoes buzzing and biting until whack, I gave them the death penalty.

I don’t even remember when we got hulaa hoops.  It wasn’t Christmas and it wasn’t a birthday.  Most toys come with a holiday.  We didn’t get toys just for no reason at all; unless you count inner tubes, which were for camping and were next to free at the gas station. Hula hoops cost something and even though they didn’t cost much, especially if there was a blue-light special at K-Mart,, multiplied by nine kids added up to expensive.  So ‘course we didn’t each have one.  We might have had three or maybe even four. For sure we had at least two, cuz we had contests, and cuz Nancy from across the road taught us hula hoop wars.

Me and Deanna and Bonita and Cathy and Tom from next door liked to have contests to see who could keep the hoop up the longest. Cathy had a fancy one with beads inside that swish-swished as she spun the around and around her waist.

 Nancy loved hula hoop wars a whole lot more than plain old keep-up contests.  For wars, you had to walk with the hula hoop spinning, and run into another Hoola-Hoop.  The winner was still spinning their hoop, while the other kid’s was down hanging dead as a door nail, around her ankles.  I could hardly walk with my Hoola-Hoop, let alone keep it spinning after running into something, so I usually lost at wars.

 Hula-hooping is easy as pie once you get the hang of it.  I could keep mine up for hours, if Mom didn’t have some chore or other for me to do.  Sometimes I got two or three going at once. I could even spin one starting at my neck and work it down to my knees.  I never did that for long, cuz for one thing, it’d be selfish to hog hula hoops all to myself and practice, and for another thing, every kind of play is more fun with someone else.  Even solitaire is better playing doubles.  Even reading is more fun when someone is sitting on the sofa reading along with you.  Especially if that one person is Mom, cuz she’s a super-duper reader and makes a story feel real.

Now that I’m grown, I still love to hula hoop.  I can’t make the K-Mart versions stay up.  I have a fancy, exercise hoop that’s weighted.  I can keep it up at least 3 minutes.  After that, I think of chores I need to do.  Besides, for whatever reason, my body doesn’t believe I can hula hoop for hours anymore. Still, I do have a lot of fun hula hooping with grandkids.

Recently, I got a chance to sit down and talk to Leela Mae, a professional Hooper.  She’s having the time of her life.  Read more about it Here.  I wonder if Leela Mae ever went up against Nancy at hula hoop wars.

Itching For a New Nose

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This is the time year when I close the windows and turn on the air filter.  I begin days when Jack Frost paints the fields with a layer of white icing.  Years before I knew Ragweed was my enemy, I wished for the sweet relief a killing frost would bring.  A world of itching filled late summer and early fall, when I was a little girl.  The real kind, not the figurative kind that’s good for us all.

My skin itched like crazy.  Sometimes, Mom taped popsicle sticks to the inside of my arms, so I had to keep my arms straight.  She thought that would keep me from scratching.  I scratched the back of my knees, and my ankles.  My skin itched from the inside out.  I needed to scratch down to the bone; not like the picky itch that a wooly sweater gives, or the sweaty itch that humid heat gives, or even the itch of a dozen mosquito bites.  It was an itch from the inside out.

“Stop that scratching,”  Mom said.  I looked down, and sure enough, there were my fingers right under the hem of my dress or wrinkling up my pant leg,just a-scratching away, without my permission.  I knew what it meant to have an itch that couldn’t be scratched.  Mom put a thick, white cream on my skin to help the itch go away.  Maybe it helped; maybe the itch would have been worse without that metallic smelling cream smeared all over me.

I knew the worst was on its way when my throat started itching.  I could get at the top of my throat with the back of my tongue, but that was just the beginning.  My eyes itched, the inside of my ears itched, and my nose itched. I pushed my nose up with the palm of my hand and rubbed it around and around in circles just to get some relief. That traitor nose Continue reading →

Load ’em Up, Head ’em Out

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Dad took two weeks of vacation every summer. One week was for getting ready to go, and one week was for the actual vacation. He always took us camping. Dad learned how to camp in the army, but he learned how much fun it could be from Mom. Mom camped when she was a little girl, and that’s before there were even campgrounds.

First off, we had to bake cookies for the trip. Mom had a big lard-tin that had to get filled up with home-baked cookies.

Deanna baked Cherry Winks, yucky, I hated those: marachino cherries and corn flakes. I hated Corn flakes ’cause of the six thousand boxes we ate saving Post Toasties box tops for all those free cereal bowls and juice glasses, and marachino cherries were so sweet they made my teeth hurt.

Vickie made no bake chocolate cookies, that’s the first thing I learned how to make in 4-H Cooking; except for learning how to make a root beer float,  that’s just scooping and pouring. Any do-do bird can do that.

Bonita made peanut butter cookies. Yum, those were best still warm with a glass of good, cold milk. I liked to hold a bite of cookie in my mouth and let the milk soak in. That’s almost the same as dunking, but no crumbs in the milk glass. Mom hated dunking, it was against the rules.

I made chocolate chip cookies, my very favorite kind, and the kind I got my first blue ribbon for in my first year of 4-H. Each of us Big Kids made about 10 dozen cookies each. I had to eat some right out of the oven, ’cause that caramel-good smell with melting chocolate made my mouth get slippery inside and it seemed like those cookies just begged to be eaten. That left a big greasy stain on the newspaper, so I put new cookies on those stains, so Mom wouldn’t know I snitched cookies.

Making cookies took a long time, ’cause I could only bake one sheet at a time, and each sheet took exactly 12 minutes. Let’s see, that’s 12X10 or 120 minutes. Okay that was only 2 hours of baking, but then there was the mixing and washing the dishes, and finally packing into the tin, with a perfect circle of waxed paper between every layer of cookies. Holy smokes, that was a project. Twelve minutes was too long to just sit around staring at the oven, so I liked to read in between. The only trouble was, if I got lost in my book and forgot to set the timer, pretty soon somebody was yelling,

“The cookies are burning,” which was usually Mom, ’cause nobody else paid attention to smoke like Mom did. Grandpa was a fireman, so she knew all about fires and she was scared to death of our house burning. She was always saying, “Are you trying to burn the house down?” That was another one of those questions I wasn’t supposed to answer.

Once I wondered what she would say if
Continue reading →

Endless Summers Behind and Ahead

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Of course, when I was a little girl, the first day of school was the very best day of school, but the next best was the last day of school.  All the summer stretching out ahead of me was just marvelous, with no particular plans, except vacation in August.  I had animals to tend, the garden to hoe, lawn to mow, and I had to help with the cooking and cleaning and watching the Little Kids, but other than that, free time, like no other time of the year.  Plus, I got to ride my bike to school and wear shorts on the last day.

School was about five miles away, in town, so I had to get an early start.  Deanna and Bonita and Vickie and me from my house, Nancy and Doug from across the road and Cathy and Tom from next door, then we picked up more kids as we got closer to school:  Mike, Diane, Bob, and Annette and Brenda. We went single file for a half-mile down the paved road, until we got to Brenda’s house; the rest of the way was on dirt roads, so we could spread out any old way we wanted. Continue reading →