Some, I'd venture to say, most people have happy memories of summer.
Childhoods spent at the family camp on the edge of the pine woods
on the shore of some small cool pond.
Or maybe weeks spent away at a summer camp with other kids
learning to sail or build camp fires, pitch a tent, singing songs around the fire at night, roasting marshmallows.
Summer might have meant day trips to the coast, trips to the local pool,
pool parties with friends, BBQs.
But for me summer was just riding my bike around the block while my mother was at work, or riding my bike around the block while my mother reclined in her plastic lounge chair, greasy with sweat, in a tube top and shorts with her black coffee and cigarettes in the back yard.
I spent a couple of summers with my dad in New York. That was fraught as well. He worked nights and slept days.
Summer to me means being alone and lonely. It means being too hot all the time because I was so ashamed of my body I refused to wear shorts or a bathing suit.
Every year, that dread and despair I felt as a child revisits me.
I'll work on changing that, but in the meantime, here's a little poem that meandered into my head.
It's a rough draft and really, just a little piece of silliness. But I'm overdue for a post, I'm supposed to be writing this shit every day.
summer's
oppressive swelter,
humidity like a warm damp wool sweater
over the face
gardens left to weeds,
potted geraniums
the color of straw
withered in
cracked soil
interminable days
stretching into
the distance
summer is
sitting in the dentist's waiting room
bare legs sticking to a Naugahyde chair
each child hour equivalent to weeks,
with nothing to occupy
oneself
but an old copy of
Highlights magazine
and the puzzles have already
been solved
in ink
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