Memories of summers past, part 2
My father was a career Air Force officer and he would get 30 days leave in the summer. We’d spend two weeks at the old home place with my Grandma Emert and various other relatives and two weeks with my Grandpa and Grandma Colligan in New York and later Florida.
The old home place was a farmhouse that had been in the Emert family for 100 years. When my siblings and I were there, our cousins would show up at Grandma’s door and off we’d go. We’d rummage through the woods near Great-Grandma Maples’ place and walk down
Birds Creek slipping over rounded rocks in shallow places. I loved Birds Creek. It flowed across the road fairly close to the home place.
The home place itself was situated on a hill that overlooked the road that Birds Creek flowed by. I used to stand up on the edge of the yard and throw rocks trying to reach Birds Creek. Every summer for several years, I’d do my best to get a rock to hit the creek. Finally, in the summer of my 12th year, I did it! You would have thought I hit a home run in some major league game.
On summer evenings, my daddy and his brothers would get out their various musical instruments and start a front porch concert. Those concerts of my childhood were some of the best ever. All the brothers were good musicians, playing guitars, fiddles, harmonicas and mandolins. Grandma would get out her dulcimer sometimes. This was when my Great-Uncle Butler taught me how to “buck” dance and I got pretty good at it. This type of dancing came from the Scotch/Irish ancestors where mountain music originated.
When our two weeks were up in East Tennessee, we’d head up to New York where we’d visit with Grandma and Grandpa on Staten Island, one of the boroughs of New York City. This was always a favorite place of mine. I loved going to the market with Grandma. She’d haggle over prices of fish and made sure they were fresh. She’d always get a bouquet of fresh flowers for the dining room table. I think this is where I get my love of fresh flowers.
After Daddy retired from the Air Force and settled the family in Knoxville, Grandma and Grandpa retired themselves and moved to Florida. They had a pretty little place in Inverness right next to a glassy lake. In the summers we were there, my sister and I would get up early and go fishing. We used dough balls as bait and caught all kinds of fish. I remember when I caught a gar. It had a long snout with teeth kind of like an alligator.
Some summers, we’d go into the Smokies and stay at Cades Cove or the Chimneys. I always managed to fall in the creek nearby. And I was no little kid then. The summers of my teenage years were spent fishing at Douglas Lake or Lake Loudon near Knoxville with my dad. We’d take his little boat out and have such a good time. Sometimes Mom would come with us. One time she caught this largemouth bass that weighed about eight or nine pounds. Daddy and I couldn’t believe it. She couldn’t either.
One summer, before my sophomore year in college, I worked as a playground counselor. This was a fun job working with kids of all ages. My favorite time, though, was when I worked with special needs adults, some who were even in their 60s and 70s. They were wonderful people who remained childlike their entire lives. I adored them, especially Michael, who was a dancer, John, who had dreams of playing baseball (he was 63), and Janice, who liked to scare people with rubber bugs.
During the summer I graduated from college, a group of us would often gather to go swimming at an abandoned quarry on a farm. We got the farmer’s permission and what a glorious place it was. One hot afternoon, a friend and I were sitting at the water’s edge and noticed rocks falling from the cliff above. We looked at each other and heard the faint rumble. We knew what it was, an earthquake, in East Tennessee! We yelled for the others to get out of the water and they thought we were kidding. No one was hurt that day, but it is still quite a remembrance. I had lived in Morocco and my friend’s parents had been missionaries in Peru. We knew earthquakes.
All kinds of summer memories have happened since my childhood and growing up years. I married in the summer and had our first child in the summer. Those two major occurrences were adventures in themselves. I’ll have to tell you about these a little later.