Another vote for summer camp. Mine wasn’t creeks and what not, though. I went to a gifted thing at a college. Lounging around, taking challenging, interesting classes, access to computers and a good library and smart kids to discuss things with. Good times.
There was a big undeveloped area next to my neighborhood that my friends and I played in. A wash ran through the center, and one day while we were exploring we found an owl sleeping in a little hollowed out tunnel.
Illegally having Fourth of July in our front yard. Using a road flare to shoot bottle rockets and other stuff that someone (usually my eldest sister) brought back across the state line.
Oh wow. So many. I can’t pick just one.
Back when I was a kid most moms didn’t work, so us neighborhood kids were home all day every day all summer. Our neighborhood was built next to a very large county park that was mostly undeveloped, save for a road that cut through it.
We’d generally get booted out of the house after breakfast and weren’t expected back until dinner. What to do? So many choices! Build/play in the fort we’d put in the woods? Go down to the creek and look for crawdads, tadpoles or frogs? Follow the creek tributary until it met up with the larger creek? Pick blackberries from canes that were taller than us and bring them back for our moms to make into pie? Put pennies on the railroad tracks for the train to flatten?
After dinner we weren’t allowed to go back down to the woods anymore since it would be getting dark soon, so that meant kickball or some other organized game in the yard or street. I also remember when the next door neighbors got a new washing machine. It came in a giant box. That thing was golden - we each took turns hiding inside while the other kids rolled us around in it.
We’d also look forward to the ice cream truck coming around - Italian ice, orange creamsicles, Drumsticks, Bomb Pops …
When I got older, I’d ride my bike down the park road into town and visit friends in other neighborhoods too.
I miss that sense of endless possibility …
I was a loner as a child, nothing was better than a day spent lying in a field somewhere staring at the clouds or reading a book. When I was 8 I got my first horse and she was incredibly calm. I used to ride her to this field bareback and then just lay with my head on her rump and my feet on her withers and read while she grazed around the field.
Endless days of playing in the (nearly carless) streets either just playing catch (if only two were there), stealing bases (if three) or a street baseball game we called boxball that no one who didn’t grow up at that time and place (West Philly, mid to late 40s) has ever heard of. We didn’t swim (polio scares), couldn’t afford summer camp, didn’t have computer games or even TV. But it seemed idyllic.
My grandmother had one of those overgrown yards, and on hot summer days we would crawl into that space under the huge drooping branches of an unpruned bush, it was like a cave, cool but very lush and with green light filtering through the leaves. We’d drag all our outside " treasures" in with us, like pretty rocks or feathers or old junk we had found, and it was often where we’d eat our snacks, like frozen juice popsicles made in Dixie cups.
My dad would take his 30 days stateside leave in the summer. The first summer memory I have is laying on my stomach on the dock with my hand playing in the water while he sat there and fished. We had trout that lived in the shady area under the docks and boathouse. I was 3 because I remember my grandfathers bulldog, who died the winter before I was 4 and we moved back to the US when I was 5.
One of my oldest memories is of my third birthday, on the side porch downstairs at my aunt’s house, and a bunch of–a bunch of older people, my ma’s friends, actually, being there. At least one of whom, I believe, said, “Do you remember me?”
I don’t think I did, and I sure don’t now.
That reminds me, weirdly, of this: not necessarily a summertime memory, but upstairs in the apartment with the Thai family across the alley, and the smell of their kitchen.
Sitting at the picnic table in our back yard with a tall plastic tumbler full of Kool Aid. My Mom used to make the unsweetened version with saccharin in a yellow plastic pitcher.
Mine would be at the beach with cousins and aunts and uncles and Cuban sandwiches and sweet tea and a pail and a shovel to play with when we had to wait for our food to settle before going back in the water.
The smell of the ocean mixed with suntan lotion is still one of my favorite things.
The “snack shack” at the summer camp I went to. I’d buy this fruit punch flavored taffy that came in a big flat package, I seem to remember it being an odd pinkish color. That snack shack was the only place I could ever find that taffy. My mom would get mad because I could never finish the whole thing, so I’d put the leftovers in my suitcase and the taffy would inevitably melt onto something.
Wading in the tidal flats in the salt marshes at Langebaan lagoon, catching the tiny hermit crabs.
The sno-cone stand at the end of the dirt road near my house. For about five of my middle school years, a sno-cone was at the end of every summer day. .25 for single flavors, .50 for a rainbow cone.
Throughout my earliest years my grandparents owned a second home in rural Vermont, a farm house that I might now describe as a little run down, but then it seemed magical to me. My grandmother would take her four grandkids for as much vacation as she could get in any given year. She tried always to have our trip coincide with July 4th, and other people would show up during our time there.
A lot of what we did has already been posted. Catching fireflies is a big one.
Summer to me wouldn’t be summer without a corn on the cob feast. Dozens and dozens of ears of fresh sweet corn, served with butter, salt & pepper, and sliced luscious, deeply red farm stand tomatoes.
There was hill that was perfect for rolling down. Also on the property was a barn that my grandmother turned into a playhouse, furnished with items from auctions, where we had some very elegant tea parties. That barn was built on stilts, and raspberry bushes grew underneath it.
Not done yet. About a mile from the house was a lake. My grandmother liked to swim early in the morning (a habit that started for her when she was young, living on an island in Lake Minnetonka, in Minnesota). She would put the towels and our sweatshirts in the dryer and get them warm before we’d go for a quick swim in the really chilly water, then rush to get into our warm sweatshirts.
My first memory of riding my trike around the green patch outside our home, when I was about 3 or 4, is very brief. A fuller one is going to the local park/green/public cricket ground, which included a tree-lined stream and pond, to catch stickleback, and then ride around the common grounds at the edge of town, along the footpaths in search of new places to explore, hills to roll down, rocks to throw (at nothing in particular - distance was the criteria) and generally cavort around on our bikes until we knew we had to be getting home as dusk was settling.
I think we were aged around 7 when we started doing this, and would be away from home from mid-morning to early evening on most occasions. Mum would ask if I’d had a nice day and that was about it. I don’t remember being given specific directions for safe ‘play’ other than don’t take sweeties from strangers, and was never approached by any unknown individuals at any time.
I was 4 maybe 5, for some reason the green pumps in our village still worked even though all the homes had piped water. Kids were having a water fight, filling buckets and tins and water balloons from the pump right across the road from our house. I had my shorts on and was going to run out into the fray but my mother stopped me because I had been a sickly child. I remember the waterfight probably because of the denial.
Many years later, we lived elsewhere, I had a big argument with my older brother (6 years) about the existence of said pump. I couldn’t believe he had zero memory of it when I had crystal clear memories of it. We sorted it out when one of our photo albums yielded a photo of the pump. I’m pretty sure it’s still there but like pretty much every pump I’ve seen since it’s now ornamental, the water long since cut off.
I have these same arguments with my siblings. I can understand the younger ones not remembering the same stuff but sometimes I think my older brother grew up on a different planet altogether.
We had a pump like that in our cabin (summer cottage) and kept it operational because the electricity was unreliable. A huge storm knocked out power for several days and the neighbors lined up at our door for water several times a day. Our manual pump saved the day.