Well, the longest day of the summer has come and gone. Now the days will be growing imperceptibly shorter even while the weather gets relentlessly hotter each day. If you live in the northern hemisphere, that is.
I grew up on a farm in Kansas. Summers were hot and sweaty. Some nights were so hot, we slept out in the backyard on the lawn. (This was before air conditioning!) We ran barefoot all summer, went wading in the creek, and tried to catch fireflies into a jar. Our Dad made homemade ice cream on Sunday afternoons, and oh boy, I loved eating watermelon on a hot day. We had a "milk house," where we separated cream from the milk from our own cows and where my mother washed clothes with a wringer washer. I still remember how good the milk house smelled - kinda like milk, I would say. Anyway, we kept the watermelon and anything else we wanted to keep cool in a tank of water in the milk house.
Summertime was definitely a time of good eating - everything from huge juicy raspberries and tomatoes from our garden to strawberries from Grandma's strawberry patch, to corn on the cob slathered with butter, with fried chicken nearly every day. Mother would kill the chicken not very long before it would be sizzling in the frying pan. (I'm glad that wasn't my job!) I was such a little sadist in those days - not that I could have killed a chicken - I would torture caterpillars by poking them with a stick and making them squirm. Geez, I feel guilty now. Another example of my cruelty: we kids would get bloodsuckers (leeches) on our feet and legs when wading in the creek. We got so used to it we didn't think much about it, just get out of the water with blood running down our legs and go on about our fun and games. But we had a city cousin who came to visit one day. Well, we didn't warn her about the bloodsuckers and did she scream bloody murder! She probably suffers from PTSD to this day. We were really wild kids, hoodlums, you might say.
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