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The first time I consciously appreciated summer was after I had been captured and held against my will in the first grade for nine months. I was a bit “shaken” by the daunts of adding and subtracting whole numbers, spelling bees and Suzie Cozart sitting two inches behind me. The walls crept closer with each passing reading class. Edgar Allan Poe wrote often of such things.
The first summer day after our reprieve I leaned against a side-yard mimosa tree and watched high flying birds sprint freely across the sky. I drank in the tint of heat as the sun radiated off my face. The air never tasted sweeter, nor was I ever more blessed as the unseen wind bounced off the branches and plummeted past. The cold hard shackles that held me tethered to a desk momentarily forgotten...
We might have only been seven, but we were not without some sensibilities.
The world was new again. Fresh and alive! Life danced in front of us as far as we could see. We didn’t know “carpe diem” from a Prince Albert Pipe Tobacco tin but it sure felt like it was time to seize something!
We celebrated the first week out of school by going barefooted, not reading or spelling a word and not going inside unless it was to eat or sleep. We swung with Tarzan across the big ditch till the quicksand dried up. We played an afternoon baseball game that lasted 215 innings. We swam amongst the cattle in Mr. Archie Moore’s pond. We knocked on Mrs. Brooks’ backdoor and “looked hungry” enough that she broke out her world famous peach cobbler. We threw rocks at Pet Milk Cans perched high on fence posts.
It wasn’t that we were against school in the summer of 1954. It was just that the alternative was so much better!
Every day was bright and sunny. And we met it with equal hope and anticipation. We didn’t invent the term “living large” but we took it to new heights!
The lesson was obvious, noteworthy, and eternal: We didn’t want to be someone else. Or anywhere else. We didn’t want to be 16 and driving. We were not interested in dating. Marriage and children were for our parents for goodness sakes! We didn’t dwell on having to get a job one day.
Here and now for us was...here and now!
You’d a’thought we had life by the tail. Forever!