Saturday
morning. I open the window and a wave of humid, hot air hits me square in the
face, taking my breath away.
“I won’t
be going outside today”, I say to myself and quickly close the window.
When did
summer become such a burden?
Back when
we were kids, the word summer had an almost magical connotation. Summer
meant vacanta mare – the summer break, “the big holiday” as we
called it. It meant freedom and friends, days filled with fun and games and peeling
skin on our shoulders and noses.
Summer
meant waking up to cool, fresh mornings that smelled like buni’s washing drying
on the line, eating a quick breakfast and then running off to my friends and neighbors.
There I would spend my days, returning home late in the evening, dusty and
tired but with a sense of accomplishment.
The same was
true for my siblings, too. They would run wild through the streets and parks of
our neighborhood, like a band of untamed natives. We were unsupervised most of
the time and if you happened to be the adventurous sort, like my brothers,
summer also meant countless accidents that ended up in cuts, bruises and
sometimes even broken limbs.
I was happy
during the summers of my childhood. I would go and stay with my great-aunt and
then my days would dissolve into long reading sessions beneath the apple trees
in her orchard, supervised by her cats. Summer with my great-aunt also meant
long afternoons splashing in a huge wooden barrel filled with water warmed by
the sun. I can still remember the smell of the wet staves – briny and woodsy,
with just a hint of smoke.
Once a
week, my great-aunt would place her wicker basket over her arm and we would walk
to the farmer’s market just at a stone’s throw from her house. She would march
determined between the concrete stalls where the farmers displayed their produce,
searching for the best fruit at the best price. She loved to bargain, my great-aunt.
Then we
would return home with her basket filled with fuzzy peaches, shiny orange
apricots, fresh vegetables and sometimes a huge, dark-green watermelon, almost
too heavy to carry.
The summers
of my childhood were endless days of wonder and discovery, of real and
imaginary adventures.
There are
so many beautiful memories that is impossible for me to hold them all in my mind,
at once.
But, if I
stay still for a while and listen carefully, they will come back to me, one by
one. And I will write them all down, making them real once again, if only for a
moment.
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