The sweetness of sharing
Growing up in India, where temperatures could soar to 120 degrees Fahrenheit in the hot season, we often had to stay indoors with few resources for entertainment. But as I look back, I recall, quite wistfully, the joy of family bonds.
Our home in the alleys of Meerut – a city northeast of New Delhi known for the famous 1857 rebellion against the British – would get so hot by midday that we poured buckets of water over the stone floor to cool it down. In the evening, we would go up to the open rooftop terrace and sit under the sky to escape the heat, an electric fan whirring nearby.
Why We Wrote This
Chasing the ice cream truck down the street. Whiling away hot days with water-gun fights. Picking figs and shucking sweet corn. A handful of writers share simple childhood memories that underscore summertime as a season steeped in nostalgia.
My father would get my five siblings and me started on a game of rummy. It typically ended with one sibling or another cheating or crying. But the real highlight came afterward: My older brother would cheer us up with a hard-to-get bar of Cadbury chocolate. As we had no refrigerator, he had to keep the chocolate immersed in cold water all day. Somehow, my mother would cut the nearly melting chocolate into seven equal pieces, sacrificing her share so the rest of us could savor one piece each.
I can now afford more than a bar of chocolate, but it’s not the same. The sweetness of sharing – in scarcity and adversity – is what still lingers for me.
– Kalpana Jain
Figs swimming in cream
In the summers of my Louisiana childhood, my five siblings and I ran a race with the birds to see who would enjoy the figs from our backyard tree first. The tender fruit was a special treat, one that hovering cardinals and jays relished as much as we did.
We strung pie tins from the limbs each summer, hoping to scare away our feathered rivals. Dangling like Christmas ornaments, the aluminum plates winked in the sun, evoking Yuletide in the depths of July. But they did little to discourage marauders.
So we had to gather the fruit before the birds did. Armed with buckets, we harvested our bounty until the high heat of noon drove us inside. Like a band of monkeys, we climbed up the trunk and claimed our own branch, each of us finding a spot within the tree’s verdant crown.
What I loved most was the sense of safety and enclosure as we filled our pails within the dense curtain of leaves. It was as if summer itself was holding us within its deep, green embrace.
My mother canned some of the figs, which we’d enjoy months later during Christmas. But mostly, we ate the figs fresh, sliced in a bowl and swimming in cream.
Summer’s pleasures are precious precisely because they’re so fleeting, best enjoyed in quiet moments before they disappear. Or so I learned while picking figs long ago, perched in a tree that gleamed in the sun.
– Danny Heitman
It was all sun and games
When I close my eyes and focus, I smile at the memory of being back on the block in Philly decades ago, reveling in the hot summer sun. My friends and I ran through the streets from sun up to sun down.
After playing video games, we rode bikes and played wall ball, baseball, and Don’t Touch the Black, our version of today’s popular game The Floor Is Lava, in which we swung across monkey bars to avoid touching the rubber mat.
Today I long for the days I swung from pole to pole to escape the friends pursuing me in a game of tag. We had water-gun fights with our Super Soakers, chasing each other up and down the street in drenched T-shirts and shorts. Sometimes we had to peel off our socks. We paused play only when our parents called us home for dinner.
At night, we played hide-and-seek. The cool wind whipped against my face as I fled from a hiding spot to home base. It was the highlight of my night. I would come home sweaty and smelly by night’s end, but my heart was full.
– Ira Porter
Ears gone by
As a child, I spent summers on my grandparents’ farm, where I’d shuck two dozen ears of sweet corn daily – enough to satisfy the hearty appetites of my Scotch-Irish relatives and the occasional Amish farmhand.
Perched on a wooden merry-go-round in front of the farmhouse, I’d sit with my cousins, a metal washbasin tucked among us as we tugged off stubborn green husks and plucked sticky, silken threads from the corn. There was a rhythm to the work, a satisfying whisk as we unveiled perfect rows of yellow and white kernels.
Aunts, uncles, and cousins gathered around the farm table at supper time, giving thanks before nabbing steaming ears from oval platters and slathering kernels with freshly churned butter. I munched my way through ear after tender, sweet ear. When I came up for air, I gasped at the tower of nibbled cobs stacked on my grandfather’s plate. He smirked at me, and I dipped my head in astonishment. When I looked up again, two nibbled cobs had mysteriously jumped to my plate!
Some 50 years later, I husk corn at my kitchen sink, disappointed with the discolored kernels I bought at a farmers market. But as my daughter sets the table and my husband kisses my cheek, it hits me. The “sweet” part of sweet corn isn’t about a perfect ear. It’s about preparing and eating it with those I love.
– Stefanie Wass
The 88 popsicle sticks
The summer I was 6 years old, I measured my life in popsicle sticks. I needed 88, the number required to build a box to hold my baseball cards. My plan was simple: Every day, when I heard the familiar tinny music churning out of the shiny white ice cream truck that appeared at the top of my street like a mirage, I would stop whatever I was doing and run toward it – the dime I had panhandled earlier that day from my mother hot in my sweaty little hand.
For a dime, I got a Twin Pop – two more sticks waiting to be liberated from their frozen bodies.
Long before I could enter a store alone and wield the power of money, I could command a Twin Pop from the ice cream truck. My dime was my passport to power.
At the end of my 88-popsicle-stick summer, somewhere around Nos. 84 or 85, my mother discovered what I was doing and said, “Oh, what a shame. If only I had known, I would have bought you a bag of popsicle sticks – all clean and new.”
But then I wouldn’t have had the tinny music to look forward to each day. Or the currency of my independence. I might have had an easier way to get what I wanted, but it wouldn’t have been the best way to get through a long, hot summer.
– Jim Sollisch
