Slowly Melting Days of a Distant, Radiant Summer (2024)

There was a time, for all of us, when summer was synonymous with the absence of school. As adults we try vainly to recapture that childhood freedom. We arrange elaborate vacations that fray the nerves of everyone in the traveling party, trips that cost thousands of dollars, so we can find some cherished patch of earth, a place where the air smells a certain way, where the sand on the beach is of a perfect grain. We search country roads for a frozen custard stand we haven't been able to stop thinking about since 1978. To prove to ourselves that we are really and truly on vacation we will turn off the cell phone, get in a hot tub and announce, "Wow, I've turned off the cell phone and now I'm soaking in a hot tub! I'm really relaxed, can't you tell??????"

For many people summer is a time to make the annual pilgrimage to the ancestral vacation retreat. To fail to make the pilgrimage is unthinkable. Such people think: "We go to the Vineyard because that is what Thimblethorpes do." The adherence to pattern is obsessive. The social codes govern every waking and sleeping moment of the day. There are precise rules about the co*cktail hour, the style of glass, the shape of the ice. To use crushed ice instead of cubed would be a betrayal of the family name.

My slight note of derision is false. I'm envious of the summer-savvy, the people who know precisely where they are supposed to go in summer, what they are supposed to do. Genetically I am programmed to experience summer as a three-month sabbatical from anything resembling structure. Camps, tennis lessons, cross-country trips with the family: That was not my experience. I did nothing in summer. It was a happy concept: days, weeks, months of nothing. A child can invent his own lessons, particularly in proximity to woods, fields and unexplored terrain. I roamed away the long summer hours.

Much time was spent at the creek. The creek was shallow and serpentine. There were infinite twists and turns. Over the years my friends and I learned every pore of that creek, every mud bog, every gravel patch where one might find a shark's tooth or an arrowhead. On a typical day the creek was merely an inch or two deep, but during a great storm it would flood, and once, after a legendary deluge, we managed to tube the river, the familiar trickle having become a raging fun ride, something much nastier and more wonderful than anything Disney could ever try to create.

Summer meant heat. I don't want to poor-mouth our existence, but there did seem to be a Snuffy Smith phase lasting for a number of years. My house was a vintage structure, the oldest in the neighborhood, the purity of its architecture unblemished by anything so intrusive as air conditioning. There are places where air conditioning is not necessary for survival, but Florida is not typically considered to be one of them. On the hottest nights I'd lie down on the wood floor, which would suck some of the heat from my body, but in a minute or two the wood and flesh would reach equilibrium, and I'd have to slither to another, cooler spot, literally writhing around for an hour in vain hopes of slumber. The fan in the window would be blowing outward, adhering to a theory of cooling that I never understood.

Naturally I wanted to spend time at the pool, any pool. My father, who lived in many different places, and eventually moved to a city two hours away by Trailways bus, always made sure that he could walk out the back door and jump in a pool. He had standards. If he had become bankrupt, penniless and without a car, bike, clothing or food, he would still have had a pool and some kind of floating pool chair with a circular pit in the armrest for a beverage.

I'd come home from visiting him and wished my own yard had a pool. This, of course, could be corrected. One day I dug a hole. It was difficult work, because the soil, though sandy, was veined with the roots of pine trees. Eventually I found myself neck-deep in the earth, and fetched the garden hose. It takes much time, I learned, to fill a pool when the pool is just a hole in well-drained soil. But of course I had all the time in the world, and soon, I had a pool.

To a degree that should not have surprised me, the water was opaque. A less generous adjective would be muddy. There would be no snorkeling, sadly. But it was still a remarkable thing, cool to the flesh, relaxing. This was luxury. This was living! Swimming pools, movie stars!

Go now. Do it. Get the shovel, and start digging . . .

Rough Draft appears three times a week at washingtonpost.com, except during the summer, when it may vanish suddenly for days, weeks or months at a time.