I have developed an acute case of summertimeitis. When it's 105 degrees outside, everything that sounds like summertime fun -- swimming, gardening, playing in the lawn with the dog -- also sounds like a bad idea to me. By the time I've lubed up with sunscreen and gathered towels, drinks, pool noodles, large hat, sunglasses, gardening tools, weed buckets, leash, water bowl, snacks, high school yearbooks, crochet needles, blank CDs, wire hangers and any number of other items we do not need, I no longer want to swim, garden or play in the lawn with the dog. I want to be indoors enjoying the bought air.
Oddly, the heat of the summer does make me want to grocery shop. Now, hear me out on this before you call the folks in white coats. As a kid, when the weather warmed 40 degrees in six hours, I'd lie back on the hood of the Ford with a stray cat or two and watch the clouds shape-shift in the sky. The songbirds, cicadas, crickets, frogs and the breeze through the massive oaks provided the soundtrack. It remains to this day the most enchanting melody I've ever heard.
On Saturdays, Mama and I would often go to town, which was several miles east of my Eden, down a washboard dirt road. I generally wasn't fond of going to the grocery store with my mother because of her gift for gab in what I considered to be poor locations. She would inevitably meet another similarly gifted woman in the frozen food section of the Big Star, whereupon I would be stuck listening to 1970s elevator music in a psychedelic spaghetti-strapped halter top and denim cutoffs in the icy tundra. There is no amount of Barry Manilow that can make that a pleasant experience for 45 minutes.
But there was a store I truly enjoyed. Not far beyond where the dirt road turned to potholed asphalt stood a white cinderblock building the size of most folks' living rooms. Green Forest Grocery held summertime opportunity for me. It was my size. The owner was a nice old man who took a shine to me. There were few patrons and no frozen food aisles from which I could not escape my mother's reins. There were only essentials for country folk -- quarts of oil, tobacco, newspapers, coffee and ... ICE CREAM.
And not just any ice cream, but ice cream I could reach myself. I would slide open the glass top of the small deep freeze and peek inside at the bevy of sweet goodness that lay below me. Naturally, the thing I'd most want -- an ice cream sandwich -- would be the item most everyone else wanted, so the inventory would be lowest in the case. The feel of standing on my tip-toes, teetering on the edge of the chest, grabbing a sandwich, and emerging into the warmth of the store is as real to me now as though five decades had not passed.
Some memories are seared to the soul -- with or without Manilow.