Summer Days

 

I hope  you are having a great first week of June. Its hot here like it is in July or August. We have had triple degree temps every day and it should last until next week. The people next door have pigs. I think I worry about them more than the people who own them. I know I am out in the heat because I feel better when it is hot. I know weird right? I have been working in the flowerbeds this week. I have been getting my porch all summerfied. I know not a word, but I like it. Summerfied. That is things like putting floaty things in the swimming pool, washing porch cushions, cleaning tables and lawn chairs. Making new summer pillows. Then occasionally putting my feet in the water of the pool to check if it is warm enough for me.

 

It pretty much looks like this around here now. Or it will by the end of next week. One of the things I like to do on hot afternoons is listen to audio books. This week it has been Wind in the Willows.  One of my favorite readers on Librivox is a man named Adrian Praetzelis. I enjoy listening to a book called
John Muir-My First Summer in the Sierra. He talks about how summer starts in California in May and doesn't end until November. He said, as John Steinbeck did that people come to California expecting it to rain like the East Coast and they are shocked by the lack of rain. Yesterday I read this:

MONTH
 MAY 2016..............0.55 
 NORMAL MAY............0.18
 DEPARTURE FROM NRML...0.37  
 PERCENT OF NORMAL....305.6

 Can you see that for us we are above normal.

Have you been keeping up with the news? Its been a bad week for animals and people. When I was a kid, and since I spent the better part of my days with animals. I loved the day school was out because I would spend my hot summer days observing what was around me. One of the things that drove me crazy was me a country kid verses kids who visited that were city kids. No clue that a Momma cow with a calf would knock you to kingdom come if you tried to pet its calf. Nor that if you walk up on a horse from behind your head might be removed from your shoulders in a blink of an eye. My grandpa said once he saw a horse kick a chickens head off when the chicken walked behind it.

I think there needs to be classes somewhere about how to treat wild animals. Wild animals will eat you or hurt you. Having a cell phone in your hand is not protection from wild beasts. I don't understand the mentality anymore.

 Summer is here. School is out. I love it when school is out. Don't you? I hear refrains of Alice Cooper's School's out forever in my mind. I remember those days, when the biggest thing on my to do list was getting a better tan. When I was a kid, on the last day of school my birth Mom would have a celebration planned when I got off that school bus for the last time. She would have kept the car that day. In the days when we only had one car. (My Mom didn't have her own car until I was in fifth grade.) She would take us to Woolworth's. We could pick out puzzles, coloring books and then every other Saturday afternoon, we might borrow my Grandmother's car and we would go to visit the bookmobile.

 My favorite tree, was a very old fig tree. Its limbs were huge and every where in that tree were rooms. Only ones I could see. I think  there is something nice about summer and climbing a tree and sitting up above the ground. Smelling the hot, dusty smell of the leaves. The cool feel of the bark and the sound of the wind thorough the leaves and the murmur
that goes on from the other trees that aren't as popular. I do think trees grow better with attention.

I would read the Happy Hollisters. Did anyone out there read them besides me? They were written by someone named Jerry West, which I think was close to the same as Carolyn Keene and the Nancy Drew days. I still have my whole set. I still love them. The terrible bad kid named Joey Brill still sends shivers down my spine. But really he wasn't that bad as I go and read them again.

Summer. I love the days when life seems to slow down. When the sky is blue and I remember the things that make me happy about summer. Oh and my birth Mom, on the first day of school, she would sit on the end of the porch and cry because she would miss us so much when we were gone. The first eleven years of my life were perfect. I only hope that someday my kids will remember their summers like I remembered mine. I wish my grand kids, had dirt roads to roam, time to watch frogs snap bugs out of the air, frog tongues really are long. To never be in a hurry and time to imagine and dream and read books on the limbs of trees.

Happy June!

~Kim~

“Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don't they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.”
― Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine