A love letter for the first day of summer

The summers I was little meant getting up early and staying outside until it was too dark to see. It mean eating watermelon on the front porch and spitting the seeds out into the dirt, the juice dripping down my chin. It meant my cousins, who were the closest thing I had to friends, coming over and staying for days at a time. We didn't have toys other than our own imagination and everyday, we made up a new game to play. We knotted daisy chains into our hair and climbed trees and ate sour grapes that always gave us a bellyache.

On the weekends, there were cookouts, twenty or so of us in lawn chairs, watching the smoke drift up from the grill. We'd watch the sun set, the sky fading from blue to pink to gold. When it got dark, we'd hunt fireflies, chasing after their tiny lights while the cicadas hummed in the tall grass. When we got tired, we'd lie on our backs and watch the moon come up, trying to keep track of the stars.

Everything seemed to happen on our front porch in the summer. This was where my grandpa used to sit and tell me stories about the war. My granny would pick string beans and we'd sit on the porch, a bucket between us, snapping them in half. She taught me how to shell peas, breaking off the end and then running my thumb down the middle to force them out. She showed me how to shuck corn, how to peel back each layer and bring away all the cornsilk.

Sometimes, my mother would take me with her to work. She cleaned houses during the day in a well-to-do suburb a couple of miles away. She didn't have a car so we used to walk, careful to mind the blind spots. A fast car on a country road is a dangerous thing. Sometimes we'd stop on the way and pick blackberries growing wild. I remember their softness, the way they burst open in my mouth, sweet and sour at the same time, always a surprise.

In the summer, I could stay up late, watching movies on cable. I could hide out in my room, reading for hours if I wanted to. I could eat breakfast or not, make my bed or not. There were no bedtimes, no rules, no do this or that. If my cousins were around, there was no controlling us. Dirt-kneed barefoot savages, we ran wild and my granny figured it was better to leave us to our own devices. "Godless heathens", she'd call us and we'd laugh and run off again.

Summer was trips to the beach and horseback rides. It was wearing my swimsuit all day, chasing each other with the hose. It was water-balloon fights and baseball games and carnivals. It was ice cream and firecrackers and driving around the countryside with my granny, stopping at every fruit stand on the way. It was fun and freedom and days that never seemed to end. And most of all, it was that feeling of being young and knowing the best was still ahead of you.