Nostalgia reigns at least once every summer for me.  How about you?

Summer is the time when one sheds one’s tensions with one’’s clothes, and the right kind of day is jeweled balm for the battered spirit.  A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief that all’s right with the world.

— Ada Louise Huxtable

Do you remember a time when you felt the WHOLE SUMMER stretching out before you?  Remember that joyous walk home on the last day of school when you wanted to shout: SCHOOL’S OUT FOR THE SUMMER – YAY!

For me, summer was a time of possibilities tangled up with long boring days of “nothing to do”… until my Mom would throw up her hands and put all us kids to work!  I know now that summer is a mixed blessing for parents… it’s a more relaxed time with moments of fun interspersed with lifetimes of being chief Kool-Aid maker, bottle-washer, daycare arranger and on-call-chauffer.  And if Mom has an 8-5 job outside as well as inside the home, well then, the late Erma Bombeck says it all in a nutshell:

Being a child at home alone in the summer is a high-risk occupation. If you call your mother at work thirteen times an hour, she can hurt you.

Wise woman that she was, Erma also said: Continue reading » Lazy, Crazy Days of Summer