Summer Time Memories

As spring turns to summer, I often feel old as I remember all of the summers I have spent lazily reading comics and fiction or watching television when I know that I should be writing. Of course, I also spend time outside, usually bicycling, walking, or swimming. These days, however, I generally feel too warm as the humidity and temperature creep up to a shocking eighty degrees.

There were many summers where I spent time fishing or running down the sidewalks of my old neighborhood, tripping over the roots of tired trees that lined the walk. One year a friend and I shamefully rode our bikes into sapling poplar trees, leaving black, oozing marks on their trunks. Last time I checked there was only one of those trees left, still battle scarred and defiant. The tree is thirty feet tall now, but its trunk is gnarled and shrunken from our youthful transgressions. Another time I rode my bicycle into a nearby water-filled ditch to avoid bees that were chasing me. They still stung me, and it just alleviated some of the pain. The same friend and I seemed to not feel pain at other times. I used to fight against him and some other friends in regular rock battles. He had a wrist rocket, and I did not. Those stones stung when they hit me, yet I always went back.

My friend Jerry and I often got into one form of trouble or another. We stayed out late at night, walking the train tracks. One time we narrowly avoided a family of skunks. We rode our bikes over embankments, damaging the tires. We wandered aimlessly, especially in our teen years, through the woods. The smell of summer always reminds me of those times. Pollen in the air, the smell of yarrow and dandelions, and the familiar buzz of a strafing mosquito makes me long for those times. I still wander aimlessly, but it just is not as much fun.