Barefoot in the Wet Grass

Well, it's nearing the end of another school year. My daughter is finishing up fifth grade which marks the end of our family's time at our neighborhood elementary school. Next year she will join her brother in the middle school. While she has slowly been asserting her independence over the past several months and I have been slowly relinquishing some of my responsibilities to her care, I know it will be a difficult transition...for me.

The one thing that will make it easier is that I know she is so ready for the change. She spent part of the weekend with her beloved cousin who is just finishing her first year in middle school and has loved it.

While the girls and I were together I completed my annual pre-summer read, "Seventeenth Summer" by Maureen Daly. The book takes place in Fond du Lac in the early 1940's during the summer between a young woman's high school graduation and first year of college. Since this summer will be the year between elementary school and middle school for my daughter, I think I read it with a different mindset. It's funny how you can read a book so many times and get something different out of it each time. Usually I read it because I love the descriptions of Wisconsin summers and it makes me so excited for summer to begin. This year it was the description of getting older and growing up that struck me:

We had never known about anything unpleasant. Our whole lives had been little-girl lives, crowded first with thoughts of kindergarten and going for exciting walks with the class in the early gray of spring to gather pussy willows along the creek banks, and eating oranges on the school playground at recess, oranges with skins so thick that they gave off a fine spray of fragrant oil when they were peeled...After Kitty the days went faster, merging into long Wisconsin winters with snowdrifts piled almost up to the living-room windows, and hot, still summers with the sunlight pouring through the trees like yellow honey...we were changing. Things that had once been so important didn't matter any more. Carnivals still came to town and set up their Ferris wheels in bright wheels of light against the night sky and pitched little striped tents all stained brown with rain, but we no longer felt the same ecstatic thrill. And we didn't go out barefoot in the wet grass hunting for tiny, green-brown toads that came out after the rain. Our thoughts were on different things.

Reading that triggered a memory of one beautiful summer evening playing with a neighborhood friend in an empty lot down the hill from our house on Glacier Pass. I must have been about my daughter's age and I was playing with a neighbor girl and we were searching for frogs and grasshoppers. The air was warm but not too hot and I vividly remember the feeling of pure happiness and the dread that it would all come to an end with the setting of the sun. No matter how many other evenings we would go down to that lot and play, it would never feel quite the same.

It's funny that a book written in 1942 that would seem to some so old-fashioned is one of my favorites. It reminds me that some of our best memories can come from the simplest moments.