Hot Summer Days
Last Wednesday I saw a robin in the back yard. I like birds but this robin was no great thing save for the fact that it was the second day of April and this was the first of the season for me. A sure sign that spring is here. The next morning on the walk into work from the parking lot I was serenaded by the many frogs that inhabit the ponds surrounding the secondary complex. Then on Saturday while photographing my daughters first time in a swing, a flying insect landed on my camera. As with the robin neither of these two events was any great thing except for the fact they have been absent for so long. It’s said good things come in threes and here they were presented for my introspection, spring has arrived, life returns to the world.
This arrival has set me pining away for summer. For those hot summer days that bring back visions of my youth. I was born in Bay City, Michigan and spent the first three years of my life here. I bounced around between Bay City and Flint and Walled Lake but I have no real memories of these years. Only fleeting images that flash briefly in my mind only to slip away when you try to grasp them, examine them and dig for the truth of yourself in them. They are the kinds of memories that you are never quite sure if they are real or imagined. Products of stories told to you by others, memories created to fill in the gaps in some vain attempt at completing yourself. So for me the first three years are fiction, events that happened to someone else. I begin in Iowa, those become the years that define me, make me who I am.
I miss those days of youth, those hot summer days. There was something magical about that time. I don’t think I can imagine any better place in this universe then Iowa in August, standing out at some lonely crossroads. There is no pavement, only two roads of crushed limestone. There are the obligatory stop signs. They serve no purpose however for you may stand there in the heat all day and never see a car. Standing in the middle you can look to each compass point and see an empty brown line that stretches to the horizon. You can taste the dust in your mouth. These roads don’t get oiled to keep the dust down, there’s no point in it, there’s no one out here anyway. Your shirt sticks to your back and the buzz of cicadas and grasshoppers is omnipresent. The breeze comes and goes doing nothing to mitigate the heat, rather it punctuates it. It brings the sound of the corn fields that lay all around and brings the complex smells of farms at the edge of the prairie. Insecticides and fertilizer combine with earth, corn and manure of cows and pigs to create a unique fragrance that can only be found in this place. The wind changes the color of the corn revealing the lighter green underside of the leaves. It creates waves of light green on ocean of dark green, waves that wash up at a red barn with huge shiny metal silos. They shine so bright it’s like looking into the sun. Everything ripples with the heat, mesmerizing you with its mirage like quality. The corn is tall, turning the roads into corridors lined with pale blue chicory. Meadow larks, chickadees and sparrows combine to create a song that ties everything together.
This is the place of my youth, a place of swimming holes and railroad trestles. I would spend hours walking the track returning home with pockets full of the things young boy’s treasure. It was a place of tree houses. It was a place of hunting crawdads in the crick. It was a place of tennis ball because baseballs broke windows. It was a place of soft serve ice cream that melted faster then you could eat it. It was a place of orange push ups and orange crush. It was a place of stars on a hot summer night. This was my Eden. I’m reminded of what Shoeless Joe said to Ray in Field of Dreams, “Is this Heaven?” Rays says “No, it’s Iowa.” I think maybe Ray got it wrong.
I was cast out just before my eleventh birthday. I came back to Michigan in May of 1979, my Dads work brought us back. I was not to realize it then but I would never be able to go back. I could return to the place sure, but now it just a place for me. I’m tainted by adulthood. The magic is gone and my youth with it. They can only be revisited in my memories now and hence I look forward to those hot summers days just ahead. For on the edge of the heat is the tantalizing reminder of my youth. Just out of grasp, but enough I think to make the heat bearable.
I hope one day to return there, end my days there. Maybe I just might be able to return to that garden one last time. Buy a farm house in the rural countryside, one surrounded by corn fields; an old one, not run down but worn with time and age like myself. Something with a history, like myself. The pealing paint and lose boards a testament to a life that was lived. I can see my self as an old man sitting on a porch in a creaking chair. It’s evening and the air is hot and still. Beads of sweat run down the beer that I am holding. A ceiling fan turns slowly over head squeaking with each rotation. There is a radio next to me and the Cubs are playing. They are still looking for that World Series because some dreams should always remain as dreams. They are the birth place of hope. The sky transitions from blue to orange, then red, then pink, and then finally to black, and the blanket of stars is pulled across the landscape. The summer triangle is high over head. A dog barks in the distance. My eyes close and the bottle falls from my hand. Beer gurgles out onto the wooden porch and I am no more. I have come home, returned to Eden. Is this heaven? No it’s Iowa.
cdl
This arrival has set me pining away for summer. For those hot summer days that bring back visions of my youth. I was born in Bay City, Michigan and spent the first three years of my life here. I bounced around between Bay City and Flint and Walled Lake but I have no real memories of these years. Only fleeting images that flash briefly in my mind only to slip away when you try to grasp them, examine them and dig for the truth of yourself in them. They are the kinds of memories that you are never quite sure if they are real or imagined. Products of stories told to you by others, memories created to fill in the gaps in some vain attempt at completing yourself. So for me the first three years are fiction, events that happened to someone else. I begin in Iowa, those become the years that define me, make me who I am.
I miss those days of youth, those hot summer days. There was something magical about that time. I don’t think I can imagine any better place in this universe then Iowa in August, standing out at some lonely crossroads. There is no pavement, only two roads of crushed limestone. There are the obligatory stop signs. They serve no purpose however for you may stand there in the heat all day and never see a car. Standing in the middle you can look to each compass point and see an empty brown line that stretches to the horizon. You can taste the dust in your mouth. These roads don’t get oiled to keep the dust down, there’s no point in it, there’s no one out here anyway. Your shirt sticks to your back and the buzz of cicadas and grasshoppers is omnipresent. The breeze comes and goes doing nothing to mitigate the heat, rather it punctuates it. It brings the sound of the corn fields that lay all around and brings the complex smells of farms at the edge of the prairie. Insecticides and fertilizer combine with earth, corn and manure of cows and pigs to create a unique fragrance that can only be found in this place. The wind changes the color of the corn revealing the lighter green underside of the leaves. It creates waves of light green on ocean of dark green, waves that wash up at a red barn with huge shiny metal silos. They shine so bright it’s like looking into the sun. Everything ripples with the heat, mesmerizing you with its mirage like quality. The corn is tall, turning the roads into corridors lined with pale blue chicory. Meadow larks, chickadees and sparrows combine to create a song that ties everything together.
This is the place of my youth, a place of swimming holes and railroad trestles. I would spend hours walking the track returning home with pockets full of the things young boy’s treasure. It was a place of tree houses. It was a place of hunting crawdads in the crick. It was a place of tennis ball because baseballs broke windows. It was a place of soft serve ice cream that melted faster then you could eat it. It was a place of orange push ups and orange crush. It was a place of stars on a hot summer night. This was my Eden. I’m reminded of what Shoeless Joe said to Ray in Field of Dreams, “Is this Heaven?” Rays says “No, it’s Iowa.” I think maybe Ray got it wrong.
I was cast out just before my eleventh birthday. I came back to Michigan in May of 1979, my Dads work brought us back. I was not to realize it then but I would never be able to go back. I could return to the place sure, but now it just a place for me. I’m tainted by adulthood. The magic is gone and my youth with it. They can only be revisited in my memories now and hence I look forward to those hot summers days just ahead. For on the edge of the heat is the tantalizing reminder of my youth. Just out of grasp, but enough I think to make the heat bearable.
I hope one day to return there, end my days there. Maybe I just might be able to return to that garden one last time. Buy a farm house in the rural countryside, one surrounded by corn fields; an old one, not run down but worn with time and age like myself. Something with a history, like myself. The pealing paint and lose boards a testament to a life that was lived. I can see my self as an old man sitting on a porch in a creaking chair. It’s evening and the air is hot and still. Beads of sweat run down the beer that I am holding. A ceiling fan turns slowly over head squeaking with each rotation. There is a radio next to me and the Cubs are playing. They are still looking for that World Series because some dreams should always remain as dreams. They are the birth place of hope. The sky transitions from blue to orange, then red, then pink, and then finally to black, and the blanket of stars is pulled across the landscape. The summer triangle is high over head. A dog barks in the distance. My eyes close and the bottle falls from my hand. Beer gurgles out onto the wooden porch and I am no more. I have come home, returned to Eden. Is this heaven? No it’s Iowa.
cdl
2 comments :
Where exactly is your still young looking HAWT wife at while you are dying on the porch with a beer?
It was not really about you, I would think you fell asleep in front of the tv watching Wheel of Fortune reruns.
cdl
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