Summer

Everyone believes that everyone has similar experiences as they do, I have heard a million times just this week about how summer vacations were as children and I find myself learning more than remembering. I grew up in an area where the closest person my age lived a mile away other than my brother. Summer entailed siblings, who had to become your friends not because you necessarily liked them, which at the time they didn't particularly like me anymore than I liked them. They became your best friends because they were all you had. There was not any "hanging out with friends" everyday over summer like most of my peers here say there were, there hardly ever was because it was such an inconvenience to get a ride to their house or vice versa. Don't get me wrong we had friends and we went places, but if we went to a friends over summer it was no more than one night a week or so. As we got older it turned into who has their license and who doesn't. When most people think summer vacation and talk about it I hear about public pools, friends hanging out and playing outside and street vendors.


When I think summer vacations as a kid, I think family, my siblings yelling at my brother and I in the backyard, playing in the stacks of hay in the barn, feeding any animals we snuck home from a family friend's home. (A family friend of ours would give us ducks and chickens and rabbits anything we could catch as kids, and we would go there once every two weeks, we were little dad was busy working there and my mom was working or wanted a break, you can bet we didn't come home empty handed ever.) Summer also involved hay season, which requires a lot of work and even more people arguing about who is right and who is wrong, thats still to this day what summer entails for me, being the only one who is available to help.


In class today, a student was giving a speech on when you think of summer in like second grade you think about hanging out, going to the pool and not picking up a book. Well, we didn't have the friends close enough to play with, we hung out with one another, we went for walks in the woods, which were always interesting experiences -which is why I get told I walk too fast- but thats another story. We worked, played and lived together, which, could be why we have such a strange relationship with one another, girls are not any less than boys, we have arms and can work too, and WE WERE EXPECTED TO.