It's summertime, now "officially" on the calendar on this 21st day of June. The summer solstice has arrived and folks everywhere are going to be the beneficiaries of some extra sunlight for their enjoyment. For Mike and I it will be a busy day in the great outdoors and we will be practicing that age old adage of "making hay while the sun still shines" pretty much all day long. We seldom have a Saturday available to us like we do this weekend and it sure is helpful to be able to find the time to catch up on things that normally have this way of eluding us during the weekday.
I was thinking back this morning to some of the greatest of summertime memories I've had in this long 58-year old life of mine. Do you ever do the same? Perhaps you have favorite recollections of your childhood years or even what you did as a teenager during the wonderful months of June-August. And if you have reached your adult years and beyond, are you continuing to make fun memories to store away in your heart and in your mind? I hope so.
It's strangely weird, all of the things that our old brains can store up in them. There are things up there in mine that have been stowed away for many years, neatly tucked into some kind of organizational fashion. They sit there and wait for just the right moment to "pop" into our thinking. When you really least expect it, there they are. I was walking along the aisle of City Market here in Montrose yesterday and saw on the shelf some little fizzy tablets for kids to put into glasses of water and immediately thought about the ones that we once in a while got when we were kids. We came from a big farming family, seven kids in all. Times were lean and very tight at many moments during our growing up years. But when I was very little I can remember my mom having a couple of packets of those things up in the kitchen cupboards and for a very special treat once in a while, we could have one in a glass of water. Think early day soda pop here, ok? Having a glass of Pepsi Cola was basically unheard of for me as a little kid growing up on our farm in the Sandhills of Harvey County, Kansas but THOSE little fizzy things? Shoot, why even ask for pop? We had those, well we had those little fizzy things and that was all right by me.
When I was 9 our parents moved us all to the small Kansas town of Haven. By that time the "big kids" in our family (what we called the first 3 of the seven) had grown up and moved away leaving the "little" ones (what we always called the last 4 of us) in a family that had changed in size. You know we still didn't have soda pop to drink on a regular basis but by now, at least once in the summer our mom would go down to the country store just a mile or so away and bring us all back a wooden case filled with 24 bottles of pop to share. I can still see what that wooden container looked like, filled with four varieties of pop with six bottles of each. I learned early on how to do multiplication just by studying that crate and its very valuable contents. Let's see now.... there was always Pepsi, 7-Up, Grape and then, well then there was also a weird drink called Chocolate Soldier. 4x 6=24 was never a hard math fact for me to remember. We had to make that 24 bottles of pop last all summer long. So generally speaking we reserved its consumption for special occasions only. When we DID have it, each bottle was generally apportioned out 3 different ways. If you wanted it to last, then you learned to drink it slow because when it was gone, it was indeed just that....gone. We would gather up the bottles, fill our little red wagon with soapy water and wash the bottles clean. They were worth money to us in their emptied state and believe me, not a one was thrown into the trash pile.
By the time we had been at Haven a couple of years, our parents built a restaurant and service station there and by the time I was 11, I found myself working as a waitress during the summer and on the weekends. We had come a long ways in our journey as a family and the little girl who only dreamed of having all of the soda pop in the world that she could drink was now serving it to customers and LOTS of it. A beverage dispenser on the counter served up a whole lot of small and large glasses of it to the patrons who would order pop with their meals. Imagine that! People were ordering pop with their food :) I can still remember (oh man, one of those crazy recollections that you would think would be gone now) that our very first prices for pop were 15 cents for a small glass and an entire quarter for a large one. What a nice feeling it was as a teenager growing up in the greatest hometown EVER to just walk over to the pop machine after school was out and draw myself up what ever kind I desired.
I'm still a soda pop drinker today, be it bad or good for me. My favorite is now a diet vanilla Pepsi or Dr. Pepper and if you know me at all then you will know automatically where I prefer to buy it from :) I've tried most unsuccessfully over the years to give up the pop drinking habit. Sometimes I make it through the Lenten season once a year but other than that, I guess you would say I am hooked to it. My mother loved diet Coke and my siblings will concur with me that she nearly always had a can of it in the refrigerator to enjoy all day long. I come by my taste for it quite naturally.
The sun is peeking over the Black Canyon of the Gunnison now and it is time to begin this new day. May your day be filled with goodness everyone as you get out to enjoy the blessings that await you. If you are reading this then you have awoken just like me. There's a reason for that, you know? What shall await us? We won't know until we get out there and find it. I'm thinking of you all this day and even though most of you are so many miles away now, in my heart it is as if you are right here beside me. I like that thought.
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