A Simple Summer

" As each one has received a special gift, employ it in serving one another as good stewards of the manifold grace of God." --  [1 Peter 4:10.]


It is Summer!

Finally, the days are longer and presumably, slower. As we used to say, "Ah, Summer! And the living is easy!"

Or, at least the summer days USED to be slower.

I remember the summers of my childhood. I think that I must have spent 24 hours a day trying to get cool.

My mother would freeze orange juice in little fluted metal Jello tins. We would take a small tablespoon from the kitchen drawer, to eat with. The smaller the spoon, the longer we could savor the sweet ice. And yes, she would shoo us outside, to enjoy our ices under a shade tree.

During the heat of the day, I would lie in the grass under our biggest tree, and imagine tiny worlds in the grass, where the ants busily built things, and the lady bugs perched precariously on the tips of the blades of grass. Or, I would swing as high as I could on the back yard swing, because I was cool, as long as the breeze whirled through my long hair. But as soon as I stopped swinging, the heat crept around me, with long fingers of shimmering haze.

At night, we would stay outside as long as possible after sunset. The air became cooler then.  We would shriek at the black bats that would swoop and dive above us.  We would grab empty mayonnaise jars, trying to catch fireflies in the jars, in an attempt to create makeshift lanterns.

Every summer, for a few nights, we would set up a canvas tent in the back yard, and sleep outside. It was cooler out there. We would fall asleep to the sound of the crickets, and the fading tones of the birds as they nested for the night.

If we slept indoors, we had screens in the windows to cool us. Each spring, my father would remove the heavy, clumsy storm windows from each window opening, and clip on the screen windows. This, and the switch from hot oatmeal to cold cereal for breakfast, signaled that summer was coming.

It was the invention of air-conditioning that kind of killed summer for me.

These days, practically every middle- class to upper- middle- class American home has air-conditioning.  We have become mere witnesses of summer, from the comfort of our perfectly cooled domestic interiors.

We no longer experience the tremendous relief of cooling down after working up a big sweat. Our fruit ices do not seem as cool to the tongue, in the air conditioning. There is no longer this urgent need to get outside, into the breezes.

I don't think that I have even seen a firefly in about twenty-five years.

On a hot summer day, the outdoors is eerily silent and inhumanly manicured -- as if we have all entered the surreally perfect world of a town like the one in Edward Scissor Hands.

On a hot summer afternoon, something is disturbingly missing. It is the sound of children laughing and playing outside. Everyone is hermetically sealed in their air conditioned homes. The streets are deserted.

Winter used to keep us indoors. Now, summer does too.

God gave us Nature. He gave us breezes to keep us cool. He gave us the ethereal flight of the butterfly. He gave us the glow of the fire-fly. He gave us the scent of the heat, when a sudden summer shower releases steam from a hot road. He gave us sweat and thirst, and our family dog panting in the heat. He gave us the caw of the bluejay, and the gritty feel of sand between our toes when we go to the beach.

If we want to be good stewards of all in Nature that God gave us, the least we could do is to get outside and notice it. Otherwise, all of God's natural gifts to us are just images passing by our windows.

[Related Postings: "Summer!", June 22, 2011].

(c) Spiritual Devotional 2014. All Rights Reserved.