Bugs, travel, cooking, and birthdays
Summer is
My roots, such as they are, are of Midwestern summers. For me, summer will always bring back memories of my earlier days: no school — vacation — camping — traveling — birthdays.
Bugs, beautiful and strange. The ones you catch with your camera every so often that take your breath away. If they aren’t pretty, they bite.
Summer has always meant traveling in a pop up camper towed behind a station wagon. Carrying everything with us mean that the first thing we did most trips was set up the campsite.
Summertime travel always meant museums. Learning new things, trying out activities Mom and Dad would never have let us do. Having a blast!
Summer also meant birthdays. Not mine, but three other big ones: My sister Betsy, our grandmother Kathryn, and Kathryn’s mother Bernice (not in the picture). Especially when I was l little, those three birthdays were one big celebration. I wondered at times if my sister ever regretted that she didn’t have a birthday to her self as a kid. (I know she now values those family celebrations.)
There’s one other thing summer has always meant to me: Cooking, pickling, freezing, and preserving summer’s harvest. In Green Bay that meant corn in June and July, cherries in August, and sweet pickles just before school started. For us as kids, these three projects were fun. I don’t know that my mother thought the same thing. (When Bruce and I married, summer also meant camping and cooking. But that is a story for another time.)
