SUMMER DAZE IN NEW ORLEANS

Those Lazy, Hazy, Crazy Days of Summer

By

Debbie Lindsey


It was summer and Momma would take one of her unfiltered Camels; field strip it, pinch a bit of tobacco onto her palm, then spit on it and with her index finger whisk together a salve to counteract the fly bite on my arm. This was when I knew Momma truly loved me -- that she would give up one of her beloved Camels and reduce herself to spitting in public just to make me feel better. And to this day I think of my Mom whenever one of those damn horse flies, attracted to the summer sweat, buzzes close to me.
Summertime is thick with memories glued by humidity and brought to mind every time the season begins to warm. I enter summer as I would the kitchen at a party – drawn to the scent and heat of food cooking and the refreshing contrast of fishing for beers in the glacial waters of an ice chest. The kitchen sheds me of pretence and formality just as summer has me cutting off my blue jeans, sweating away the make-up, and allowing some sun to sneak through and color my winter white.
I am a kid again, kicking off my shoes, running from the school year and into summer. June made me giddy with an entire season of freedom ahead; and August had me anxious as another miserable classroom awaited my return. But in July I felt securely tucked into summer -- the epicenter of vacation, of freedom. July was the cream in the Oreo.
My older sister, Susan, was a bookworm, a girlie-girl, a well-behaved child with little curiosity of the great outdoors. She did not prepare Mom for me. I was the “you could drive a saint crazy” kid. Momma was quite fond of this saying and it seemed to be my first name for years. This was kinda scary since every saint we studied in religion class was already bat-shit crazy.
Summertime became a headache for Mom when I entered kindergarten and a migraine from first grade on up. Summer was sweeter to me once the regiment of school (something I never fully took to) began -- summer just sang freedom.
Up until I was eight we lived in a rather self-contained neighborhood – a dead-end street with light traffic and little in the way of wildlife. There was a red clay gully with a few arthritic underground springs that dampened the base. But for me, a huge fan of Tarzan movies, it was a jungle. My poor Mom nearly fainted the first time she saw me coated in mud and clay, leaping from the branches of a half rotten tree, clasping a vine and swinging across the gorge.
Mom just didn’t know how easy she had it with me until The Move. About the time I turned eight our family moved to the frontier, the Wild West – well sort of, it was two miles west of the relatively civilized dead-end street. Mom would come to remember that gully as playpen safe.
It was the 1960’s and developers were seizing large tracks of land and turning sheet rock into homes. We were in a subdivision, full of yards and kids, with streets that circled and climbed small hills and curlicued in and out of culdesacs. I was in bicycle heaven. But the best of the best were the woods. Now Momma had something to worry about.
These new suburbs were not total clear-cuts. An oak tree of substantial height remained in our new back yard. I would fall from that tree so often that the grass beneath could never take root. It was a grand time to be a kid.
Our neighborhood was surrounded by nature still in the raw. The creeks and springs accompanied by stretches of swamp land may have seemed inconsequential to land developers in the days back before the EPA but to us kids it was the deepest and darkest of Africa and I was Tarzan (too much the tomboy to be Jane). We had forts, trails, swimming holes, an abandoned shack that just had to be haunted, and there were rumors of bobcats and the reality of snakes – lots of snakes. We had all of this, and my Momma had a world of worry for many years.
My sister was seven years older than me, so I was too young to notice, but I am sure there had to be some point in her childhood when she played outdoors and actually got dirty – but I never saw her break a sweat. About the time I began racking up a scar for every day of summer Susan was a teenager who seemed to read all day long – her purple quilted bedspread was actually worn to a frayed lavender where she would lie and read. Susan may not have been much of a playmate for me, her being a snooty teenager and all, but she served as a distraction for my folks (and a comfort, at least one child turned out normal) so that I could slip under the radar and run a muck.
Working up a good sweat, the kind of sweat that would attract gnats and horseflies and have Momma on bug bite alert, was a big part of summer. One glorious exception to this was swimming. I could turn my back on my beloved woods for a swimming pool any day. I was just starting to learn to swim when I met the Gale family down the street in our new neighborhood. They had a swimming pool. Now Mom could add “drown like a rat” to the list of potential perils.
The freedom and heat of summertime sweetened my childhood, just as my Mom’s worries over my life and limbs made my adventures seem all the more daring. And without a big sister to rebel against, I might have been the one languishing in the air conditioning rather than learning a love for the outdoors – a love that lingers with me to this day. There are no photographs in the family albums of my rough and tumble antics; but the scars and calluses remain, faint and fading among my wrinkles, reminding me of my younger spirit and a time when the best of everything was just within spittin’ distance.