Remembering the summers of yesteryear

Jean Martin

Published Sunday, August 3, 2008

In the past several decades I have written hundreds of columns. As is true with most writers, a few have become favorites. So it is with this one, which I re-read and re-publish in golden memory.

July is now past its place on the calendar and the long, lazy days of a Deep-South summer still hold sway in our daily lives. Through a haze of memory I recall those golden hours of childhood: the feel of dewy blades of grass between the toes of bare feet; the sleepy hum of hens in their pen at the bottom of the pear orchard; and the long, twilight evenings that began with supper just before first dark and ended when the skies turned to purple velvet sprinkled with silver.

The children ate their supper from the round oak table on the screened back porch of their grandmother’s house. Sometimes it was wedges of cold cornbread and vegetables left over from the midday dinner cooked on her cast-iron range. For each plate they chose a tomato from the row ripening on the ledge below the screens. They laughed as the juice squirted when they bit into the smooth, red firmness, licking out with their tongues as it trickled down their chins and tasting of sun and fresh-turned earth.

Sometimes they helped themselves from the mason jar of fig or pear preserves standing open in the center of the table, digging into it with a long-handled spoon and leaving tiny golden drops of fruit syrup on the faded oilcloth. The boy, the oldest of the four cousins, preferred eating his cornbread with little new green onions.

They ate as rapidly as the grownups at the table permitted, washing down their food with great gulps of buttermilk so rich it left flecks of yellow around their mouths, never taking their eyes off the sky, where the sun was flinging its setting banners of rose and indigo beyond the pecan grove.

Finally, at a nod from a mother or an aunt, they pushed back their chairs, each grabbing a handful of homemade tea cakes from the linen pillowcase in the kitchen safe drawer, then running down the long hall to the front porch, the boy leading their way out the screen door, which banged shut behind them.

Outside, first dark had fallen. Locusts rasped their evening song from the ancient oak and lightning bugs flickered golden through the wisteria vine their great-uncle had shaped into a small tree and hovered over the briar rose hedge edging the empty field between their grandmother’s house and that of the neighbor.

The children dropped down to the porch steps, the boards still warm from the heat of the day. The grown-ups made their way outside and sat in the green-painted wooden rocking chairs and in the swing at the end of the porch. They rocked, the chairs creaked, the chains of the swing squeaked and their voices rose and fell softly in the rhythm of the summer night.

The children left the steps to chase lightning bugs around the yard, dropping their catches into the boy’s jar and clapping the lid back on it before the insects could escape. After each catch he held the jar aloft for the three girls to admire the glow.

A street lamp was mounted on an old wooden pole near the house and there the bullbats flew at night, swooping and darting at insects attracted by the light. Sometimes the children threw rocks at them, but the grownups always sternly reprimanded them “to leave those bullbats alone, they eat the mosquitoes.” The children learned long ago that bullbats are really nighthawks or nightjars or whippoorwills. But there was a time, a very long time ago, when they were part of the magic of our Black Belt summers.

---

WOULD YOU LIKE TO SHARE THIS STORY?

---