Welcome Home!
I just dropped off my son for his last day of seventh grade. Giddy with summer expectations, holding on to his yearbook, he couldn’t wait to get the last half-day of school over and done with. Before him is a summer of soccer and camps, family visits and lazy mornings. Too young to get a summer job (except for mowing my lawn) and too old to do most of the day camps, all he has is a loosely structured plan for the next couple of months.
As I headed back downtown it hit me: What I really need is more last days of school.
I want to feel that way again, you know, here’s a summer and it’s yours and we don’t need anything from you until August or September.
Now run. Play. Grow a couple of inches. Swim. Go have some fun.
My summers were nothing extraordinary compared to the summers of my friends.
I lived on a farm so my chores continued, but with summer came fat and happy horses to take to horse shows, stubble fields to race them on and sometimes a gravel pit full of water to take them swimming in.
No one drowned that I can remember.
In my northern home country, daylight lasted almost until midnight so those of us with farm jobs put in some long work days. We drove tractors and combines, caught escaping cows, stacked bales and filled grain trucks. I was a horrible tomboy, not to be outdone by the neighbors’ boys, and I had little interest in appropriate girl behavior.
I wore jeans, not dresses.
And things got a little rough sometimes. Just ask my dad how many times he had to take me to the ER with cuts and scrapes and bumps and bruises.
As if that wasn’t dangerous enough I wasn’t just land-bound: Sailboat-owning friends would invite me along on day trips – once to Germany, but mostly we’d sail out for a good half-day or so, drift for a while if the wind wasn’t too strong, napping, eating, forgetting everything but that sweet rocking of the boat.
On the way home, we’d meet friends on other boats and sometimes we’d race home.
I only remember winning the race for the harbor once.
Driving back to work on Friday, I wish I could give my son just one summer like that.
Just one summer smelling like horse, getting so dirty you weren’t allowed in the house until you’d hosed off “the worst” outside. A summer of hayrides with a purpose and cows that follow their own schedule.
But as we are now city slickers he’ll have to settle for a visit to Grandpa’s farm now and then, and an endless stream of his mom’s crazy stories. So far, he’s gotten tired of neither.