Summertime - share a memory - make a memory?

Chasing fireflies in June, a great memory.

One year, I was driving through the Mohave Desert on Interstate 40 on the Fourth of July. It was supposedly out in the middle of nowhere, but I could see fireworks displays in every direction. I stopped in a rest stop and watched them from all sides.

Every summer for the past four or five I love to walk the boardwalk of my summer beach city and watch it come alive. My friends’ blues band plays outside a dive bar on the boardwalk on Monday nights and it is great to listen to the music and people watch. It’s a bit like Cheers – you never know who’s going to be there but you almost always run into friends.

Gonna make some good 2016 summer memories tomorrow, at the Wolf sanctuary.

c.a.n.’.t…w.a.i.t.!

Last summer was like a dream. I spent a large amount of my time with one jelly friend who could also be my best friend who died recently. We could chat all day and never run out of things to say. It was also the time when we started frequent communication via Skype and discussed our future. He even helped me a lot with my book. He was the first and who firmly believed I could be a goid writer. I had never had anyone giving me so much encouragement, before that my creative work was looked at through indifferent or negative eyes. There wasn’t a single day when when weren’t together. It was the best summer I’ve had.

How I wish to have that summer again! I found that since he died there was a dramatic change inside me: I became more independent, stronger and more confident about who I am. I guess he was the one who had changed me. I’m never the same person again and I’m still striving to prove his last word was right “I think you could make a difference”.

Summer of 2013 I spent in Bar Harbor, Maine doing a project for school. There were 16 of us total from my school. My two best buddies up there, Matt and Josh, were newish friends to me but we had hit it off so fast (Matt is now my boyfriend and Josh remains our closest friend to this day). We were housed in seaside cottages on the campus of College of the Atlantic, little hippie school where the only major is Human Ecology and they feed you polenta every night. We shared our home with a chipmunk and lots of crane flies.

Up there the main attraction is Acadia National Park, and on the nice days I was climbing mountains every day, but when the weather was bad, life got pretty slow as there wasn’t much to do that didn’t involve the outdoors. We had a week long stretch of rain that had put our projects on hold (had to use electronic equipment outside) and everyone was feeling a bit glum.

One evening we’re out for dinner at Rosalie’s Pizza downtown and the sun peeks out from behind the clouds. Now, Josh, Matt and I had had our eyes on a pair of side-by-side mountains called the Bubbles (cuz they’re next to Bubble pond), and we were itching to climb them at the next opportunity. We discussed whether we’d be crazy to start a hike at 8pm but quickly decided we didn’t care because we were too stir crazy.

So we set out to South Bubble. The hike starts in a deciduous forest and there was a heavy fog from the last few days of rainfall, making the whole setting look eerie. Josh made a few Slenderman jokes but then we had to stop talking like that as we’re all a little easily spooked.

The woods let out on Jordan pond, which I later learned is quite a big pond, but I wouldn’t have known it from looking at it at the time, as the fog only let us see a few yards in.

After the pond begins the climbing portion of the hike. Here we had to slow down, as it was getting dark, and the rocks were slippery with moisture, and Matt has a prosthetic leg so he sometimes has to get a little inventive in order to get himself where he wants to go while hiking. Among the three of us we had two flashlights, so Josh took the lead with his, and I took middle with mine, and every time I took a step I’d pause and shine mine backwards for Matt.

Every time we got over a rise, we’d pause and look back and marvel at how we couldn’t see the rocks we’d just been on, as they were lost to the fog. The eerie call of a hermit thrush floated through the air to us from some hiding spot not far away.

The whole way up I was running on pure adrenaline. The sense of vague danger, the growing closeness I felt with my buddies, the act of using my body to propel myself up a mountainside after spending the week cooped up…I felt like I was holding in a lunatic laugh the entire time.

Here we are at the summit.

On the way down, I started getting afraid of wild animals and insisted and we sing and talk loudly the whole time because I thought it’d save us from getting eaten. Matt later admitted to me he didn’t enjoy himself because he was scared the whole time. Strangely, though, for me it’s the highest memory of that whole beautiful summer.

Don’t think I’ll ever have anything quite like that again. This summer, I’m just expecting to make memories starting my new office job.

I would love to replicate any of the summers at our families summer cabin and part of the reason I bought the lake house we have so my kids can get a taste of that. Early July I will host my son’s friends there for his 17th Bday and expect to have a great time on the water that weekend. The lifetime memory will be taking the family down to my recently departed moms house in Florida to have that one last visit to her house that will hopefully bring closure and solace to the heartache we all feel for her loss.

My late sister was seven years older than me. There was a park near us called Platt Fields. She bought me a little fishing net and we would go to the park and I would fish for tadpoles. She’d sunbake. I was about six and she was about 13. I remember one time she told me to leave my net and my jar of tadpoles (I’d had a very successful fishing trip), and we’d get an ice cream. I was a bit dubious about leaving my precious catch, but the lure of ice cream won me over. When we got back, the net and the tadpoles had gone. I was devastated and made her walk around check out everyone else’s stuff to try to find the thief. She was very patient with me.

My daughter was born in the summer (July 13th) of 99, no other memory of the season can compete

@Tropical_Willie, I hadn’t seen fireflies here since I was a kid. But a few weeks ago I was attending a late-afternoon back yard meeting at a friend’s house, which is surrounded by huge trees, and as the sun started setting the little critters were everywhere. It was a wonderous sight that flooded me with snippets of happy memories and feelings from those long, lazy, carefree summer vacation days between school grades a million years ago.

One of my sweetest summer memories is eating icy-cold watermelon with my family at one of the many little melon stands that cropped up in Fort Worth in late spring. A server brought a perfectly ripe half or whole melon straight from the ice room to our picnic table and we attacked it like ants. We sprinkled a little salt on our slices—Mom and I ate ours with a knife and fork, Dad just picked up a slice and dug in.

Thank you all for sharing these memories. I wish I could give them all multiple great answers. I’m re-reading these vignettes and enjoying them so much.

(I’m still letting my favourite summer memories battle it out for first place – I’ll be back)

Family summer vacations were only occasional when I was growing up, so the few became very distinctive in my life.

One of the best was when I was nine, my family rented a cabin on the water in Duxbury, Massachusetts, at the entrance to Cape Cod. The cabin had a row boat for exploring the slough, and lots of frogs and chances for fishing and getting wet and muddy. A childhood idyll.

My summer “memory creation” coming up is I am going to Chicago tomorrow for a long weekend, two concerts planned, a dinner and a brunch with groups of friends, a little bit of exploration via river and lake cruise.

I remember making homemade ice cream on the Fourth of July. That was way back before the electric cranks came out and all of us kids took turns turning the crank. I think being a part of the making of the ice cream made it taste better.

I live in an area where the summers are hot and there is an abundance of rivers and lakes and the coastal beaches within a couple hour drive.
Fond memories include river rafting and hanging out at the American Rver all day as a teen.
Swimming, sunbathing, then, ( aaah the energy of youth ) going out to party the nights away. haha

www.theamericanriver.com

I remember the anticipation of breaking open watermelons that had been iced down in rinse tubs while we ate pot-luck at family reunions.
We didn’t even have air conditioning back then, and literally breaking open the dark green dinosaur eggs so they could dump out the deliciously sweet, tiddly-wink studded red meat was as close as we got to rural magic.

Not to be duplicated. It was just another time.

I wish I could go back to my grandmother’s house on Cape Cod, where my cousins and I spent our summers growing up. The beach was down the street, little more than a block away, and every day was fun and special.

I lost my virginity to a nice small red-haired girl (I was 17, she was 16 but she wasn’t a virgin) during the summer at camp.

A wonderful and short memory; our love lasted until she and I went back to our respective cities.

I had no contact with her for 40+ years until we reconnected on Facebook a couple years ago.

my mental elbanditoroso.

@ibstubro LOL, The Little red haired girl was my first thought too.
TLRHG at 16 maybe? haha

L*O*V*E

Man, those two would have some seriously giant headed offspring. haha

Wow what a day today. Wolves, foxes, raccoon, elk… Cheeseburger grits and half slab of ribs… Ran the Jeep through a hundred yards of gravel stream… Beautiful Anna!

One for the history books.

cell phone off all day

Gonna sleep good tonight!

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies Are you cuddling up with your pussy. haha

@Coloma You affected by the Trailhead fire near Todd Valley?

@zenvelo Not directly, it’s smokey and the fire is burning about 25–35 miles away right now, but…the wind has shifted the last few hours so the smoke is going the other way now.
We did, however, put out an offer for any evacuees that need space for horses, sheep, goats, chickens or other livestock but so far no contacts. Such a sucky time of year for us Californians. ugh!