I have dream-like memories of vacations in Michigan and Florida, swimming in lakes and the Atlantic. Summer at home in Kokomo, Indiana meant playing baseball in the middle of the confluence of Elliott Court and Haynes Avenue. It smelled like cut grass and tasted like water from a garden hose and, yes, homemade ice cream.

On warm, humid nights, we kids cranked the cylinder first, after chomping on a dirty chunk of rock salt that, to our bafflement, made the crushed ice surrounding the silver cylinder colder. Our hands froze as we plunged them into the special double-layer paper bag of ice to replenish the churning bucket, which drained saltwater into what was probably the enameled metal bathtub Mom had bathed us in years earlier.

We could never wait long enough for the cream to “set,” no matter how much my parents explained how ice cream is best when it is thicker than a milk shake. We were awestruck as Mom lifted the paddle from the canister and thick, sweet white icy cream clung to the rungs. Then came the tense wrangling: who licks the paddle? And it wasn’t just my brother and me contending. Cousins might be there. Neighborhood pals materialized out of the thick summer air.

Bugs, Lanyards, and Pools

I still have trouble saying “firefly.” They’re lightning bugs and we put them in jars: proof that magic is real.

One summer I would walk down to Miller-Highland Park beside Wildcat Creek for a craft class taught by a pretty young woman—a teenager—named Jody Mustard. She taught us to weave potholders, braid lanyards, and paint plaster of Paris casts of animals. That’s where I learned the word “shellac.”

We rolled in the grass. We hid. We sought. We counted backwards. Until the stars came out.

I execute a sedate dive into a Florida motel pool around 1960.

And summer was flying off a diving board into sparkling pool water. We invented dives, wildly gyrating and flailing through the air before plunging headfirst into the cool. We competed to see who could cause the highest splash resulting from a “can-opener” off the high dive.  Or someone threw a sparkly coin into the water, and we dove into the luminous liquid silence to fetch it off the spider-web light show on the bottom of the pool.

Does this seem like a Norman Rockwell life to you? To me, it’s simply memories of summer days long ago. What did summer feel like for you?

In the photo at the top, the Denny brothers, Mike and Dave, seem nonplussed about walking the plank into a sparkling pool.