I grew up in the heart of Georgia, in a subdivision of mass-produced tiny brick ranch houses. Apparently, either a Yankee or some Californian living in a dry place came up with the idea of building red brick ovens to put people in.
(Caveat: in case any Yankee or Californian is offended by my references to Yankees. First off, God loves all His children, even if they are born in the wrong half of the country. Second, technically, my children say that I am a Yankee. They are wrong, yes they are, but here's why: my Mama was born and raised in Illinois. She married a true blue Southern boy who came up there to get a job at the Caterpillar Tractor Company. See, it was a TRACTOR company. They had me. They lived there six more months and one day shook their heads and realized that God's country was indeed in the South. They had to get the heck outa there. So I guess you could say I'm a Yankee, since I'm half Yankee and lived there for a few months. But -- the Bible shows all the geneologies with the Father's bloodline....so since my Father is a Southerner, not to mention one of the bonafide Sons of the Confederacy, and I have lived here all but 6 months of my life, I submit that my Southern roots take the day.)
Back to the subject at hand: these houses were obviously not designed for the south. They were rectangular boxes with tiny windows. The ceilings were 8 foot high or shorter, so the heat had nowhere to go. There was no air conditioning, so they were more like large torture chambers that heated up early in the day and baked everyone inside them into sweaty, doughy, miserable masses.
When you look at old Southern homes, they were built right. The ceilings were 10-12 feet high, so the heat could gather way up there instead of at your body. The windows were sky-high and often opened all the way down to the floor, so you could open them and catch the breeze. There were porches everywhere, to bring shade to the house and also to have a place to visit and enjoy the outside without being in the sun. They knew to orient the angle of the home so that there would be cross-breezes when everything was opened up. When I was a child, we would occasionally visit old relatives out in the country who lived in those smart-Southern-built homes. The families were usually poor and there were pigs under the porch, but to me these houses were heavenly, even if they were humble and unadorned. And of course there were always screen doors, just waiting to be banged by us kids.
Whoever came up with the brilliant idea to put those masses of short, stout brick houses in Georgia surely is now in purgatory. Thankfully, along the way, air conditioning was invented. My parents eventually acquired a window unit for their bedroom, but you had to keep their doors closed because it wasn't powerful enough to keep anything else cool. My sister and I would take our bath right before bed and then talk and giggle far into the night, with the sheets kicked off. We only had the idea of curtains on the windows, so the breezes would be free to come in. I remember looking at the moon and praying to God, just talking to Him. He wooed me like a baby to Him.
Even though it may seem like summers were misery, to us kids they were not. They were heaven on earth. Even the heat did not really bother us. It was all we knew. And when you are young and slim, and there are lakes and fields and trees to explore, the earth was a sumptuous banquet of possibilities. We traversed our little world, stole horseback rides on the neighbor's horses (without the aid of saddle or bridle), fished for fish that didn't exist in the neighbor's lake, made trails all over the woods and fields around us. We rode our bikes all over the neighborhood, racing each other. When a summer rain would hit, we would peel off our clothes down to our underwear and play in the water-filled ditches. Our front yard was the neighborhood softball field. Home base was a crack in the driveway, first base was the first big bush on the right. Second base was a worn spot on the property line and third base was the water meter. We would play for hours and hours. With our house oriented directly on the right side, you would think there would be broken windows, but no, we just learned to hit away from right field (there was no right field). Our Daddy coached us at Powder Springs park for years and also coached his Post Office team, so we lived, ate and breathed softball. Mama would feed us supper then we'd head to Atlanta for his games, where us kids would play in the dirt and on the playgrounds. There was (and is) a park named English Park, off of Bankhead Highway in Atlanta. There was a spooky cemetery next door to the park and we would scare ourselves thinking about the ghosts that must be stalking us from there.
My childhood summers are a sweet, balmy memory to me. I think of creamy ice cream cones that we would stop and get on our way home from ball games. I remember the bittersweet bite of muscadines and blackberries that we gathered by the bucketfuls from the fields around us. The penny candy that we got from Reese's store around the corner. A frozen Snickers bar from Sun Valley Beach (Melanie and I rode our bikes to work there for many summers). Homemade vanilla ice cream, hand-cranked on the back porch. No wonder I have too much fat on my body....I'm trying to recreate those summers!
I would often think about "someday" and that when I had kids, I wanted them to have some of what I had as a child. It was important to me that they have fields and creeks and places to explore as they grew up. So when Ken and I married, it was our eventual goal to get out to the country. We bought and sold several fixer-uppers and eventually moved to five acres in the middle of miles of forest and land, moved a camper onto the land and took two years to build our dream home. We homeschooled our four children, so they had a lot of time to explore and enjoy nature, barefooted and dirty, without sunscreen or helmets. We had a TV, but not on Mom time. I rarely turned on the TV during the day. We did not have computer games or devices to distract them. Nobody had a cell phone until everybody was almost grown. We did this on purpose, not because we were poor or weird. Well, we probably are weird. I wanted them to think, imagine, play, use their brains and to not be entertainment-driven. Children need to have great capacity to entertain themselves and to come up with all sorts of things without outside stimulation. We are losing this in our society. So the beautiful, sweet summers of my childhood were passed to my children. They had an old-school upbringing. We had to be weird to make it happen, but now that they are all adults I think they all would say it was worth it.
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