Nostalgic Summer

I'm so glad that summer is almost here... I mean officially.  Kids will be out of school soon (except for my oldest, who will be in summer school for Earth Science... I could kill him!).
But, I digress.

So for some reason, the past few days I have been feeling very nostalgic, almost deja vu-ish if you will.
I don't know if it's because I've been doing so much reading, and it makes me think of the summers of my youth when that was all I would do?  Like those summers of long ago, I have been spending so much time in my yard and losing myself in my current read.
I believe I've already told you how I would walk to the Queens Borough Public Library in Jamaica, Queens when I was a kid and spend hours and hours there, wishing I could bring home a hundred books!  Well, I couldn't possibly bring home that many, but I did haul a lot home with me.

I remember getting home and going up to my room, dumping out the bag of loot, and wondering which one I should start with.  When I finally chose the winner, I would head outside to sit under the trees and just read the day away.
I would read Encyclopedia Brown mysteries, mysteries by Ruth Chew, Nancy Drew - of course... really, any mystery I could get my hands on.   And I remember just wanting to literally dive into those pages and find myself sitting beside Encyclopedia, or Trixie Belden.  It seemed that whatever they were doing was a heck of a lot more exciting compared to what I was doing in my little backyard on Long Island.

But that's not all.  Of course, as an adult, a mom, a wife.... I have responsibilities that I need to tend to that have a tendency to jerk me out of whatever bookish reverie I'm in at the moment.  Dinner needs to be made, laundry needs to be done, pets need to be fed... and the list goes on.

I long for those lazy days of being 8 or 9 or 10 years old.  When it was too hot to even move (we didn't use the air conditioner in the 70's unless it was 110 degrees in the shade, and even then, my mother would come up to our bedroom and if there was even a hint of a breeze moving our curtains, that air stayed off!), I would lay on my bed in my little girl pj's (in those days we called them "baby-dolls") and just turn the pages of my book.  If you stayed still enough, the heat wasn't so bad... as long as you weren't moving around.

And during the day, there was no such thing as staying inside to watch t.v. (there were no video games or internet), so we were outside from mid-morning until 8 o'clock at night.  On the really stifling days, I would sit on the porch with my Grandma - she had her knitting and I had my book.  There was always a big old bowl of cherries or grapes between us, and slowly our supply would dwindle, as Grandma's knitting got longer, and the pages left in my book got shorter.
Eventually, my sister - who is not a reader would say "let's go under the sprinkler!".  On went the bathing suits, and out came our imaginations.  We played "t.v. tag" where you had to name a t.v. show when it was your turn to jump over the sprinkler.  If you couldn't name one, or you repeated one that was already said, you got punished, and had to sit on the sprinkler for 5 seconds!  Variations were "cartoon tag", or "Brady Bunch tag", even "Charlie's Angels tag".  And when we'd had our fill of the sprinkler, we'd dry off and my sister would go off on her bike, and I'd lay out my towel and pick up my book.


Those are the days I feel nostalgic about.  When there wasn't a care in the world other than "which book will I read next?".  When it felt decadent to stay up until 11o'clock at night reading until my eyes were so heavy with "sandman" that I couldn't keep them open anymore.  Or sitting for hours in my Grandma's lounge chair (the plastic tubing kind that fold into thirds and the legs swing out... you know the kind from like, 1977), reading until I got called to come in and set the table for dinner.

That's how I'd like to spend my summer.  Forget about the laundry - we'll be nudists. 
Forget about cooking - we'll eat the veggies from the garden all summer, and nothing else.
Who cares about housework?  Who needs to do dishes? (if we only eat what's in the garden, we won't have dishes anyway!)

I think that atleast for one day this summer, I will escape to  1970's Long Island, go out to my backyard and sit in my lounge chair with nothing but a bowl of cherries and a pile of books.  Where my only decision of the day is "which one should I read next?"  It sounds like heaven.

And who knows, maybe... just maybe one of the kids will join me and revel in the moment of being a kid... with nothing to do and not a care in the world.  Until one of them asks me, "Hey Mom?  What's for dinner?"

Update... "Q & A" With Patricia Batta Will Be On June 28th

Just wanted to give a quick update.  I received an e-mail and it seems that author Patricia Batta is so swamped with her books, that we had to postpone our "Q & A" session until the end of June.


The new date for her to stop on my blog is June 28th.
Sorry for the confusion!  Hope to see you back here then!

Until then, Happy Reading!