“Those who bring sunshine to others cannot keep it from themselves.”
— J.M. Barrie
Each day of this summer season has been filled with a great balance of both work and play, and living through it reminds us to make time for every bit of it.
Watching my grandchildren play outdoors brings back memories of time spent with my sisters and cousins when days seemed endless, right along with the opportunities for fun.
The woods hold an array of possibilities, and the game being played can shift like a magical sleight of hand the second a hint of boredom hits the air.
A downed tree stretching across the border of the woods became a raft for sailing to foreign lands, but could immediately be transformed into a horse if a kid with a cap gun showed up. We were suddenly cops and robbers, the good guys jumping on the back of that horse to chase the bad out of our perfect village.
On the hottest days of summer, mom would pack some snacks in a picnic basket and tell us to grab our bathing suits, and off we would go to the farm pond. The endless entertainment picked right up in the swimming hole.
“Let’s pretend we are in the Olympics. You have to choose if you are in the diving competition or a racing swimmer,” one of my sisters would say.
Why we felt the need to compete when we could have been relaxing never occurred to us. Relaxing made no sense to us. Neither did applying sunscreen. I’m not sure we even knew the word, and if such a thing even existed in the early 1960s, I doubt the products were ever on our mother’s shopping list. We lived outdoors every chance we were given, whether working or playing, and we all knew very well the sensation of a sunburn.
I recall two jobs of summer that were nobody’s favorite: walking the pasture fences of the dairy farm herd to check for possible problems and picking up rocks in various farm fields. Those jobs, with no shade to escape to, brought the worst sunburns, and all these years later, they keep us heading to dermatologists for skin cancer checks.
In spite of the daily chores, we dreaded the end of summer for many reasons. No matter how old I get, I still carry that feeling. If the sun is up, it’s time to get outside and do something, anything. There are a couple of differences for me now, though. I do have the wisdom to apply sunscreen, and I most definitely enjoy relaxing under the big blue sky of sweet summertime.
Enjoy these glorious days of summer. We never know how many we will be given.
