I think of summers growing up along the South Carolina Blue Ridge, and I think of warm tomatoes picked fresh off the backyard vine, glasses of iced tea so sugary sweet you could stand a spoon inside and homemade ice cream, hand-cranked on the back porch and made with the wild berries we picked in the woods behind our house.
I think of summers growing up in a house cooled only by an attic fan, and I remember my sister and me putting our pillows in the open windows to cool them before bed.
I think of childhood summers, and I can still feel the gooshy-bottomed mountain lakes we swam in, Uncle James teaching a dozen of us cousins to water ski, his crackling yelp echoing across Lake Greenwood when one of us got up for the first time.
Summer comes, and I feel a strong identification in my bones, bare feet running through the sprinkler in the back yard, Mama's juicy fried chicken and potato salad at family picnics, long, languid hours lying in the tree house my father built into the pines.
Clearly other seasons bring their own brand of visceral feelings and nostalgia.
But summertime spins a particular gossamer fantasy, a suspension of the real world, a sense that childhood, like fireflies, might last forever.
We parents have first the memories of our own childhood summers. And then, bonus, we get another set of memories when we have children. In our case, these memories would be created in a whole different part of the country, my husband’s native Michigan and the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lake Shore where we spent endless Julys in our friend’s little cottage aptly name The Little House.
This time, too had a strong identity, this modest cottage with its hardwood floors and ladder back chairs, its white chenille bedspreads and its great room with one wall devoted to great vacation reading, “The Old Man and the Sea,” “A Perfect Storm” and a kazillion “Cottage Living” magazines.
Much like the easy rhythm of my childhood summers, there was a rhythm to these summers, too, beginning with unplugging the 12-inch TV in the cottage and putting it in the closet as soon as we arrived. We'd leave the cottage each morning, returning at night only after we’d swum in one or more of the area’s half-dozen turquoise-colored lakes, or floated down the Platte River on cheap inner tubes, or searched for signature Petoskey stones along the shore, after we’d listened to bluegrass music in the evenings at the open-air restaurant while eating ice cream cones, after we walked to the grand lakefront for the sunset.
This was no built-up Gatlinburg with attractions. The only attraction was falling stars and sailboats, constituting a simple but identifiable time we all came to realize was the epitome of summer, and finite.
Indeed, we don’t go on vacations as a family anymore.
Instead, for the last two summers, the three kids have gone to Michigan with their dad and without me, as he and I are separated from each other.
The four of them are all there without me now, in fact, retracing the steps we once took as a family, texting me photos, them at the lake, at our favorite restaurant, at the store where you can buy everything cherry, cherry salsa, cherry chocolate, cherry wine, cherry gummy bears, cherry pie, even cherry-laced sausage.
I could, of course, wax not only nostalgic but pitiful — that childhood summers are beyond me now, that they are there and I am not -- which I'm pretty sure I did that first year they went without me.
This year, I find myself glad we all have the memories, which seems to be a function of age.
At some point, longing for what was gives way to gratitude that we ever had it to begin with.
My feelings may also have something to do with the deck on my house, which I had the foresight to paint blue just recently — not the safe Colonial blue you see on houses, but the joyful, glowing blue of a robin's egg.
My friends from South Carolina see my photos online and tell me the deck looks like a Carolina sky.
Funny, then, my friends from Michigan say it looks like the pristine lakes there.
I step on the deck and I am in both places at once again.
But I am also present right here, as fireflies light up the night.
