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May 16, 2005

In The Good Ole Summer Time

Summer has always been my favorite time of the year. I like all of the other seasons but growing up in Florida, summer was what we lived for. I originally posted this to my blog three years ago (!) and decided to rehash it. And yes, I am avoiding the fact that I haven't yet posted my Rome vacation pictures from a MONTH ago. Gah.

Grandma's lake.

It actually has a real name but damned if I ever knew it. My grandfather owned a sand company and used to dump a load of white sand on the shore of the teeny tiny lake behind their house to make a beach. He also built a floating dock held up by oil drums and anchored with a car transmission. I cannot begin to add up the hours spent swimming to and from the "dock". There were alligators in the lake, which meant that the one-minute swim to the dock was nerve wracking if you put too much thought into it. The alligators generally kept to their side of the lake though. We used inner tubes of several sizes from the assorted tires of tractors. I can still vividly feel the pain of scratching my back on the stem if I happened to enter the tube the wrong way. Speaking of pain, the sunburns we received were noteworthy of cancer journals. My sister and I used to have two contests. One was to see who could get the darkest tan by the end of summer and the other was to see who could peel the off largest hunk of dry skin.

I learned to waterski when I was around 10. We started out on a sheet of plywood rigged with a tow rope. On hands and knees, we would hold on for dear life. The first time I got up on skis, I traveled around the lake (took about 6-7 minutes) several times with my dad yelling for me to coast into the shore. You must be kidding. There are alligators in here! I eventually learned to coast right up onto the sand. We would take off by sitting on the edge of the dock and letting the boat jerk us up and away. I eventually got good enough that I could start in the water with one ski. My uncle Larry had a Hoby Cat that we also spent quite a bit of time on. My sister and I would lay flat on the front of the pontoons and fly like goddesses of the lake.

Leggs Eggs

Our summer kicked off each year at Easter. My grandmother would throw a family picnic / Easter egg hunt for all the cousins. She gave us a Legg's egg (remember those?) with a new bathing suit inside. Needless to say, my bathing suits do NOT fit in one anymore. Oh the screaming and yelling and laughter! There was a swing in front of her old house that never rested. The kids sat at the kid's table for dinner of course, so there was little actual supervision, which was the best part. Once, we worked very hard on figuring out just how far you could swallow a pea down and still be able to cough it back up. I accidentally choked on the pea (go figure) and hacked it onto the floor where Bobo the dog promptly ate it (thank you, may I have another?). Dinner was effectively over because we could not stop laughing. Remember the fits of laughter that erupted spontaneously? And continued on and off for the next hour no matter the dire threats from your mother to knock it off?

Stray memories

Gramma's hammock, the bug zapper, fireflies, finding fossil shark's teeth at Alexander Springs, SAND, tanning sea shell prints onto our backs, Daytona Beach, body surfing, walking on stilts, the pogo stick, penny drops from the tree in the front yard, Roseanne Brantley, Japanese plums and drunk birds, the datil peppers I was dared to eat, racquetball, the public pool, riding our bikes through the halls of the empty high school, gigging for frogs, my uncle Donny's airboat, the enormous (20 ft tall) piles of sand at the sand plant, learning to pedal my bike backwards (sitting on the handlebars), sitting in lawn chairs with my sister cutting mountains of philodendron for my dad's greenhouse business (okay, and cutting the lawn chairs too)

Posted by DebC at May 16, 2005 8:13 PM

Comments

Posted by: Kim at May 16, 2005 9:29 PM