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The Theory and Practice of Summer
On Thursday last we were told that summer began at 0507 Central Standard Time (central to what and standard to what have never been explained).
At 0507 on the 21st of June in Anno Domini 2018 summer began. How does anyone know that? How is it that at 0506 we are in spring, and at 0508 we are in summer? What happened?
Y’r ‘umble scrivener proposes a truer means of determining summer, a joy from our childhood. All small children know, even if adults have forgotten, that summer begins when they open the kitchen door (no other door will do) and look out onto the happy new world that comes with the first Monday morning after the end of term. That is the first day of summer.
At eighteen, of course, a young man or young woman looks out the same screen door and realizes that he or she is just another unemployed American.
Beyond barefootin’ freedom, summer in Texas is better in theory than in practice. The advertisements feature happy families posing in the sunlight with paper plates and slightly carnivorous grins around a chromium grill the size of a Buick where Dad, in cartoon tee and ball cap and a made-in-China that says “Hail to the Chef,” burns hamburgers and wieners.
In this Sunday supplement world of summer there are no mosquitos, allergens, or rattlesnakes. No one sweats or faints because in the ads the air is free of soul-withering heat and damp, just as the children are free of heat rash, pustules, and sunburns that will erupt as skin cancer before they are thirty.
The unadvertised reality is that the kids will sleep late, gripe when made to get up for breakfast, gripe about the breakfast, and then sullenly resume Kill-Millions-of-Your-Fellow-Human-Beings videogames left incomplete in the middle of the night.
The household employed will have to get off to work as usual, reminding the older children to wash the dishes and a load of clothes, and they won’t.
If an especially energetic boy decides to shoulder his rod and reel and bicycle to the old fishin’ hole, his chances of being eaten by an alligator are much higher than in his parents’ time. Alligators are a protected species and, after all, by this infallible logic of posters to the U.K. Daily Mail, alligators were here first and so enjoy proprietary rights to human flesh.
Those few children who are rousted out of bed and required to cook, clean, wash, and maybe even help in the garden or fields are the blessed ones, though they don’t see it that way at the time. Children who are required – not yelled at and then ignored with a sigh – to help around the house learn self-discipline, a sense of duty, the decision-making processes to accomplish different forms of work, and an appreciate for the duties of grownups. Household chores are an element of love.
And children folding clothes are doing the dishes are less likely to be eaten by alligators, who seldom lurk by the washing machine or twist themselves around the vacuum cleaner.
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