“Life: It is about the gift not the package it comes in.”
The songs of the birds are calling me. I can hear their chorus from inside the house. I’m showered, papered, so to speak, coffeed and ready to be outside. Gracie, smarter than I, is there already. It will be hot today; the paper says 75°. I can think of no better place to be than on the deck. From my window here, I can see a light breeze ruffling the leaves. The umbrella is open and waiting. I’m the only missing piece.
I never knew people with decks or patios when I was kid. We didn’t even have an umbrella for the beach. My friend’s aunt had a pool, and we went there a few times. I was awed. I guessed she must have been really rich. No family had two cars. Only Marty Barrett had been out of the country, and that was because his mother was British. She and his father had met her during the war. My mother was around all the time. Everybody’s mother was. My father worked long days selling tobacco goods wholesale for J. P. Manning. He was seldom home before dark no matter the season. We lived on one side of a duplex. We had really bad neighbors for a while, but then they moved. A firefighter and his family moved in, and they were great neighbors. I used to visit them and was amazed at how their house exactly mirrored ours. We shared a backyard and divided the clotheslines. A family vacation away was a rarity for us as was going out to eat. I remember lots of days at the beach. My mother never learned to swim so she was always sitting on the blanket. My dad was the best swimmer I knew. I loved watching him body surf. He made sure we all learned to swim. Summer days were spent roaming town, exploring the woods or enjoying the playground staffed every summer with two counselors. I made a lot of potholders.
I never felt deprived as a kid. Life was rich and filled-that seemed to be enough back then.
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keepthecoffeecoming.blog 
May 25, 2010 at 12:48 pm
It’s 90 here, on the way to 94.
Nice and cool in my basement frog room / office. 😉
s
May 25, 2010 at 9:49 pm
Yikes!!
That is far too hot too soon in the summer. We had a great breeze on the deck all day, and I stayed outside a long while. The night too has a breeze but less so than the day.
May 25, 2010 at 1:49 pm
Gosh, I never knew anyone when I was growing up who had a pool!! (But then I grew up on Galveston Island and if you wanted to get wet, there was always the beach.) The kids would play at one house until that mother got tired of the noise and ran us off to someone else’s house. There were bicycles and jumping ropes and jacks and hopscotch and roller skates with keys to make them fit. I was (and still am) a reader and loved trips to the big library. We never ate out and vacations were trips to visit relatives. Going to the movies was a treat because it was air-conditioned. My mother was an excellent seamstress and most of my clothes were homemade. I never felt deprived either.
May 25, 2010 at 9:52 pm
Florence,
That was a friend’s aunt who lived in another town. Usually we went to the town pool all summer, a long way from where I lived. We’d be cool swimming all day then die from the long, hot walk home.
I too made trips every week to the library. It was always cool inside even without air-conditioning. My favorite vacations were the days trips we took to beaches and museums and parks. It was fun to do something different each day.
Nope, never deprived!
May 25, 2010 at 4:18 pm
My Mom and Dad met in England during the war, she’s the Brit. Dad’s fighter bomber got hit and he had to ditch the plane in the Thames. He also did one of those mind over matters for his co-pilot to jump and broke all his fingers on the stick keeping the plane level before he jumped too. His Co-pilot is my Godfather. My Mom volunteered at the hospital where Dad was getting help with his hand and that’s how they met. We traveled back to England many times as a infant and child, mostly by boat. I have fond memories of everyone on the boat spoiling me. About that pool . . . the kid everybody hated had the pool in our neighborhood. His parents owned a furniture store and had put it in to go one up on the doctor on our block who had a pool too but no kids.
May 25, 2010 at 9:54 pm
Z&Me,
I have called my itch for traveling the Barrett syndrome. The disease developed in the sixth grade when Marty left for England, again. I vowed to outdo Marty in traveling the world. I believe I have!
If I had know you, it would have had a whole different name but still the same challenge.
No pools in my neighborhood.
May 25, 2010 at 4:34 pm
No one had a pool when I was a kid except those little kid inflatable pools. Everyone had one of those. We put it in the shade because the water would heat up if it was in the sun. The lawn sprinkler went in the sunny part of the yard. Most of us kids preferred the sprinkler to the little pool. It wasn’t so good for the grass though. If we played rough under the sprinkler, the grass generally turned into muddy green slime.
Nobody had a deck but I lived in an immigrant Italian neighborhood and everyone had a stone patio that usually had a hand-built stone wall around it and a hand-built stone fireplace on it. If someone’s house came without those things, I think the neighborhood fathers got together on a weekend and built them.
May 25, 2010 at 9:56 pm
Caryn,
My sisters had one of those pools, and I remember it always had a lot of grass from their feet. A slip and slide was on the hill some days, and we all, even the adults, joined in.
My father was never big on us running through the sprinkler for that very reason: his grass.
May 26, 2010 at 10:33 am
I believe my father sacrificed the grass in that area to keep us out of his hair while he was watching us.