Summer Magic?
Remember when you were a kid and summer felt like forever? By the time school started it felt like you had lived two or three lifetimes. There were always big changes and huge events. Summer used to be filled with adventure, comedy, tragedy, drama, romances and vacations.
Friendships were made and broken over a summer vacation. Romances started and ended in just a matter of weeks. There were friends that I stayed in touch with over summer and then there were friends I only saw when school was in session. It was as if there were two very different worlds, the school world and the summer world.
My favorite summers were the summer between 7th and 8th grade - 8th grade and my freshman year of high school. I recall how much I loved my bedroom. No bedroom since has felt so wonderful. I had white sheers on my window that veiled the roses in the front yard. During the evening heavier drapes could be pulled across the sheers for privacy.
The bed was centered in the room with an antique quilt on it. On one wall was an antique deacon’s bench with a cute cushion on it. The room didn’t look like something out of a magazine, it was closer to the description of Anne’s room at Green Gables (Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery).
Sprawled across my bed I wrote poetry, read books, listened to music and chatted with my friends on a pink telephone. I had many a late night conversation on that phone over the summer.
I lived within walking distance to the mall (about a 5 minute walk). My friends would come over and we would walk to the mall for lunch or a coke and cookie at the cookie shop. One summer we went to pick out our bathing suits (a really big deal for any girl with youth and a blossoming figure - LOL). I had narrowed it down to two suits, one in lime green that my mom liked and the pink and black that I liked. A summer drama occurred when my friend made the decision for me, she bought the lime green bathing suit after telling me that she didn’t like it at all.
At that age fashion and shopping became a cut throat, stealth maneuver filled with more manipulations, strategies, and fibs then “The Donald” could ever cook up on “The Apprentice.” By the time I went into high school I was well versed in keeping my fall wardrobe to myself. No one saw it, no one shopped with me (other than my closest advisor - my mom), and I never told anyone where we shopped or IF we had gone shopping or not.
Now that my school days are far behind me and I don’t talk to any of the friends that I went to school with, the summer seems rather tame. In my house now I share a bedroom with a boy (my husband) and most of the mysteries of the opposite sex are no longer a mystery. Not that it’s such a bad thing. I don’t miss the angst, drama and anxiety.
My oldest is thirteen now, the same age I was during my favorite summers. But, he’s a boy and summer just isn’t quite the same for boys. In fact, if I had known then what I know now, I never would have given boys as much thought or credit as I did. Summer for boys is not the high drama that it was for me.
Kate, my daughter, is only ten and dramatic summers are still a couple of years away. Not that I am looking forward to them, because I’m sure she won’t listen to me anymore than I listened to my mom. LOL And, that’s ok. We all have to learn…
It’s funny how as we grow older we trade out one kind of magic for another? The childish mystery of Christmas is behind me now, but it has been replaced with creating that magic for my kids. And, that is wonderful. I’m not sure what kind of magic I have replaced the old summer magic with…
Perhaps I traded it for occasional pedicures, sleeping in, lazy mornings, watching cartoons with the kids, and weekend trips to the beach.
Sometimes it doesn’t seem like a fair trade. ;o)
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July 22nd, 2005
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Posted in: Personally
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