A Jungle of Great Beanstalks
This post was written on June 29, 2016.
This weekend, my sister came to visit for a few days, and after our kids were in bed we got to talking about some of the things we did in the summer as children. We spent every summer of our childhood, up until age fifteen or so, in Fairport, New York, the upstate town where my mother grew up. With two teacher-parents, summer meant vacation for all of us, and we’d load up the car with enough clothes and toys and bikes to last eight weeks or so at my grandparents’ house.
The days were completely free. There were select planned activities--one year, karate; another year, tennis; always, every year, swimming lessons at the local high school pool--but mostly the hours were ours to fill. Neither of us could remember everything we did. But some things stand out vividly:
Grinding chalk against an upturned bike’s tires, then mixing the dust with water in paper Dixie cups and painting trees with sticks
Filling ziploc baggies with water and tossing them in the air again and again until they burst
Drawing elaborate chalk cities on the driveway
Collecting beer and soda cans from all around the neighborhood, then turning them in for change at the grocery store
Riding our bikes nearly every day across town to the library, by ourselves, over two sets of railroad tracks and a lift bridge, at a far younger age than anyone would feel comfortable with now
Yard-sale shopping, learning the thrill of the found treasure, including all the costume jewelry in the picture accompanying this post
Of course, there’s much more. But what I’m getting around to saying is that the memories I have from those summers are intense, visceral, and mostly triggered by specific smells: old beer in cans left for days in the sun, strawberry Suave shampoo cut with water to make it last, green walnuts rotting in the grass, old books in air-conditioning, clematis twining through the porch railing. And, of course, the feeling of our return to our own home at the end of each summer, the stuffy closed-up house, my bedroom an unsettling blend of familiar and strange. One year, the weeds in our garden had grown unchecked, creating a jungle of great beanstalks as thick as my wrist and over my head.
With my own kids free as birds this summer, I can’t help wondering which of the many experiences we’re giving them will lodge in their memories. I can’t predict it, and I can’t control it, and the more I might try to puppeteer their little lives, the more antiseptic and unmemorable their experiences will be. Already, I see flickers of what will stick: the time a bee stung Lucia on the stomach at the playground in Connellsville; the tick that I struggled to pull out of Andrew’s leg in New Hampshire, both girls looking on in horror; the day we let them go into a boardwalk candy shop and pick out a Beanie Boo for no reason! in Ocean City, Maryland.
And I guess this is a pretty good definition of the things they’ll remember this summer and every summer to come: they’ll remember the flash of surprise, or pain, or uncertainty, that shows up in the middle of an ordinary day. They’ll take note. (And if I have any say about it, they’ll make a note--Lucia’s keeping a journal this summer, a sentence a day.) It won’t all be perfect. But it’ll be theirs.
