IN THE GOOD OLD SUMMER TIME

Back in the late forties, there was a Broadway musical called” In the good old summer time.” From that musical came a song with the same title that has always stuck in my mind. I think to be truthful that song has been with us a lot longer than that, but it was made most popular, at least for me, by that musical. But then music is only one of the things that jogs my meandering mind when we talk about summer.

What is it about summer that seems to be so magical and so much more dramatic than all of the other seasons? What makes us have such pensive thoughts about soft summer breezes, singing cicadas and the sweet smell of clover? Of warm days at the beach and star filled nights around a flickering campfire. Precious memories of holding hands in the moonlight, and waking in the morning with the one you love to the music of the songbirds. Ah yes it has been said that a life without love is like a year without summer. Well the analogies abound, but it’s the ambiance of course that inspires us. It was said by Shakespeare “All of the world is a stage.” A stage that in the summer time, more then the other seasons, is so beautifully choreographed that it invokes a treasure trove of memories in all of us that we never seem to forget.

To the school age kids it’s a respite from the pressures of learning and studying. To the famers it’s time to plant and reap the crops. To the golfers and fisherman the game is on. Like the animals that emerge from their burrows in springtime, we too come squinting out of our shelters to face the suns warm rays and enjoy yet, another summer. As I look across our small lake this morning I see the trees and houses on the opposite shoreline mirrored in the placid waters. From somewhere around the point a loon is calling to its mate and high overhead our resident Eagle pair, silently and seemingly so effortlessly, patrol the shores.

We are blessed here in this heartland to have this performance put on every summer for us. This is a special place on earth where no words can do justice to a perfect June day. Gertrude Jekyll said, and I quote, “What is one to say about June, the perfect time of perfect young summer, the fulfillment of the promises of the earlier months, and with as yet no sign to remind one that its fresh beauty will ever fade.” But fade it will and so with that in mind we tend to overdose on it, while adding yet another summer to our resume of life. Like the growth rings on trees, in the end our lives will be counted more by the summers we have lived, then anything else we have experienced.

Summer has something for everyone in the lake country. There are beaches and warm water for the youngsters and waterskiing, camping, fishing and a chance to get back to nature for moms and dads. For the elderly it’s warm sunshine on old arthritic bones and the sweet aroma of a fresh rhubarb pie cooling on the porch rail. Tulips and daffodils and fragile irises showing off their delicate blooms. They grow, they blossom, and then they quietly fade away, much as we do. But unlike us they have the power to reincarnate themselves and their summers will last for all eternity.