June is Like That

On Sunday night we got home from a week with the brothers and their families in North Carolina. It was a grand time of connecting and catching up and letting the youngens go to coffee shops and make bamboo huts and play pickleball and swim in an icy mountain creek and sleep on the trampoline.

Gabe and his brother Wayne took 14 of our collective offspring (my brothers’ children too) on a rigorous 6.5 mile (almost 7 miles!) hike up the profile trail on Grandfather Mountain. We ladies stayed behind and picked them up about five hours after they started their adventure. I drove a Suburban up the mountain, and that is as close as I got to hiking on this trip to the beautiful Smokies. I did cross the Mile High Bridge and nearly blew off the mountain in one of those gusts they kept warning us about.

When I was catching up in my diary, I found myself mapping the days by the fabulous food we were served: Becca’s seafood paella, Carma’s homemade pasta with Alfredo sauce, Hilda’s carne asada, the trout BLT at the Live Oak Gastropub. All the food was a wonderful adventure!

We actually planned an extra day on this trip to catch up with old friends who are not family. It was a time that was rich with connections, and by the time we drove into our own lane, we felt that we would need a few days to recover from all the excitement.

I don’t know why we ever go away in June, though. It is so beautiful here this time of year! I almost missed the tiny Asiatic lilies that never bloomed before. Every morning we are serenaded with the triumphant birdsongs that signal a successful hatch. (Let’s just pretend we don’t also have starlings croaking in glee about their babies.) If we slow down on the salads, the lettuce will bolt. I don’t ever eat store-bought lettuce, undressed, just for fun, but garden lettuce is that good, I can stand out there and just eat it like a rabbit. It is advisable to watch for slugs and earwigs though.

Speaking of rabbits: tonight when I was checking on the garden (I do that every day) I noticed that I no longer have a promising row of broccolis. I now have a pitiful row of stalks stripped of any identifying leaves. Then I saw that the sugar snap peas have also been chomped. And as charming as Peter Rabbit is, I feel such an affinity for Mr. McGregor. Apparently the garden fence is not shocking. I checked it by bravely grabbing hold of it. Nothing. No wonder I have pests.

Gabriel has our patio/pavilion finished, except for metal on the roof and a small matter of a pizza oven he wants to build in one corner. We are loving that outdoor space, and spend a lot of time out there. I potted up a bunch of perennials and set them around to soften the edges. The whole thing is delightful, except for the mosquitoes. The mosquitoes we have always with us.

This evening I have the back door open, with just a screen door to keep out the bugs and the night. The girls’ voices are carrying up from their campfire in the woods. They have friends here and just sent an emissary in for food to roast. I sent sausages, a few hotdogs, and a loaf of bread for toast with fresh jam. They have been in and out of the creek all afternoon, which, as I recall from childhood, makes one roaring hungry. My mom used to let us take a Tupperware container of cookies out to share. It was great, because we could float the container on the water and sail the cookies to each other. I do remember the damp from wet hands reaching in to the container, but none of us died from the bacteria we consumed so glibly.

Both Gabe and I were raised with freedom to roam and build fires and cook dubious things outside. We went barefooted and wore practical, sometimes downright ugly clothes. It didn’t matter very much if we tore them or stained them, and we cut our sleeves off short for the hot weather. We star-gazed on the porch roof and climbed silos to gain heady views in the daytime. We rarely sat around in the house in the summertime, and we did kind of a lot of things that were not strictly safe. Guess what? I wouldn’t trade my childhood for any safe armchair experience. We sure as anything send our kids outside now that we are parents. In the world we live in, it feels more important than ever to teach our children how to be grounded to realities. Real dirt loaded with bacteria, water with crayfish in it instead of chlorine, sunburns and freckles, bandaids on blisters, and the collapse into bed at night, completely knackered by the day’s work and play. I could talk about this for a long time, so I will just shut up now, and hope some of you agree with me.

Oh, one more thing… we had ZERO screens in our childhood lives, and we lived to tell the tale. We didn’t even listen to radio. Yet we grew up to be fairly normal people, probably with overactive imaginations, but that’s not the worst that could happen. Our children do have some screen time most days. They use apps to study languages and practice instruments and play Minecraft. They listen to audiobooks and ask to watch movies. It would seem so simple if we could time-travel back to the ’80’s. But we can’t. We are here, now, in this era. It is a tricky one. We listened to Stolen Focus on our trip, and I felt a little panicked for our digital society. Then we got Plough Publication’s latest issue titled “The Good of Tech.” This is the tension we find ourselves in. Lord, help us!

I have to keep looking at the calendar to keep track of where we are going, which day it is, and should the garbage go out tonight, or did we miss it last night? Our homeschool evaluations are done, and we really should be making plans for next year, but I don’t want to! Not yet! It’s June, and it goes by much too fast!

Is anything brilliant happening in your summer? (The perfect watermelon is brilliant, in my opinion.)