Summer Sundays

It’s amazing how one thing – a scent, a sound – can transport you back in time to a memory you didn’t even know you had…

Sunday’s weather was glorious – warm, but not too hot. The sky was blue and filled with puffy white clouds – the kind that look like beautifully huge cotton balls or perfectly white cotton candy. A slight breeze stirred, carrying all the wonderful smells of an early summer afternoon in the window…

The moment I stepped out of the car in our driveway after Mass, I knew someone was grilling. Not on a gas grill, but the old charcoal briquettes kind of grilling. It has such a distinct and familiar smell. It made me hungry for a good old-fashioned, no-frills hot dog and hamburger cookout.

I sat by the open window near our deck, breathing in the scent of whatever someone was grilling, listening to the sound of people enjoying the afternoon and suddenly I was transported back in time…

On a Sunday afternoon, you could find our family gathered at my Grandparents’ home. After Mass, everyone ended up there. In the cooler months, Sunday dinner was generally a meal of roast beef, mashed potatoes, homemade gravy with everyone crowded around the table together followed by games or music or whatever we decided to do for the rest of the day. But in the summer, it was different…

My Grandparents had a lovely in-ground swimming pool. On a summer Sunday afternoon, we could not change from our church clothes into our bathing suits and get in the water fast enough. The house was filled with the impatient inquiries of the children: “Can we go in the pool yet? Is it time to swim yet? Can we go in the pool yet?” We had to have adult supervision, of course, and my Grandmother usually insisted that we put something that resembled lunch in our bellies while we waited for the Aunts and Uncles or my Grandfather to return and be ready to take us swimming.

Finally, it was time to hit the water! My Grandfather kept the pool filled with a garden hose that somehow produced the iciest water on the planet. Getting in the pool slowly was torturous; we Cousins always thought that the best way to get in was the over and done with method – just jump in and go.

Once in the water, we played and swam and floated and jumped and splashed all afternoon until the shadows shifted on the surface of the pool. As the sun began to dip below the tops of the tall trees at the edge of the yard, the water turned colder for a whole different reason than the icy hose water. We stayed in the water, though, until we began to smell hot dogs and hamburgers cooking on the charcoal grill and someone’s Mother called us to dinner.

Dripping, shivering, and exhausted, we found our way to the screened porch in the backyard. We ate like lumberjacks – exactly the way you’d expect kids who had just spent the afternoon swimming and playing hard to eat. As the day waned and the late evening fell upon us, we changed from our now dry swimsuits into regular clothes just in time to roast marshmallows and chase lightning bugs in the yard while the grownups talked together on the porch until the sun was gone and their voices called to us from the dark inside the porch.

We went home feeling a very particular kind of tired…it’s the tired that comes from a long summer day spent playing hard and swimming, drinking in every last second of the summer sunlight and relaxing in the warm summer evening. No baths were needed on those nights; we all went home squeaky clean and drunk with chlorine and pool water, asleep before our parents’ cars had reached the end of the street.

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Today I’m joining Josie Two Shoes at her blog for Two Shoes Tuesday.

(OK, so it’s Thursday…but still.)

This week‘s themes are summer and storm.

Click over to Josie’s blog and visit!