Holidays Past and Present

My Fourth of July celebration brought memories ranging from sappy sentimental to those that tapped into my well of youthful playfulness. I was at my youngest niece’s house on a lake and since I spent all my summers growing up at a cottage I felt right at home with the beehive of activities that goes along with holidays spent next to a body of water. Motor boats, sailboats, swimmers, sunbathers, family parties in yards as far as the eye can see and the smell of grilling food coming from all directions. It was busy in the sensory over-load kind of way that I enjoy for its memory triggering side effects. I was one of twelvish guests that included my brother (the oldest one there) and the sweetest, pixie of a baby girl who just learned how to walk a few weeks ago. Age mattered because we lined up to eat by age and I was third in line. It was a running joke but being the baby sister it was fun teasing my brother, the elder statesman at the party.

Growing up my brother always managed to get into more trouble than I did. Probably the worst thing he did was run full speed into a bob wire fence, nearly decapitating himself. A slight exaggeration but there sure was a lot of blood, a tense ride to the hospital and stitches from ear to ear. He sported a gauze dressing around his neck for quite some time afterward. I’ve never asked but I think he loved his scar because it was fertile material for inventing stories in his youth. The most creative tale was about an Indian attack at our fort in the woods. As the years passed by the scar faded to a point that I doubt anyone asks anymore. But I’ll bet he still gets questions about his half-finished tattoo of a pair a dice that comes with a story about getting under-age drunk with our cousin. It hurt so much he never went back when he was sober to get the tattoo finished. That, and probably the fact that our mother hit the ceiling when she saw what he had done. You can only wear a Band-Aid so long on your forearm before a mother needs to see what’s under it. 

At my niece’s house we were all down by the water when someone asked about some round, lime-green balls that were floating by. Some were guessing they were eggs of some sort, others said they were parts off a plant. The 1985 Ron Howard movie, Cocoon, came up. If you don’t remember that drama/comedy/sci-fi film this IMDb plot summary will refresh your memory: “A group of aliens return to earth to retrieve cocoons containing the people they'd left behind from an earlier trip. These cocoons had been resting at the bottom of the ocean. Once retrieved, they stored these recovered cocoons in the swimming pool of a house they'd rented in a small Florida town. Their mission is hampered by a number of elderly people from a nearby retirement community who had been secretly using the pool, and who discover unusual powers from within these cocoons.” It was a favorite movie of my husband’s and it inspired some interesting conversations back in its day. What if there really was a foundation of youth, would you want to live forever? If you were invited onto an alien spaceship, would you go?

I had forgotten how easy it was in our youth to get my brother to do my bidding until I suggested we could tell if those green balls floating by were plant or animal if we cut one open. It didn’t take long before my brother scooped one up and squashed it open. I protested that if there was a creature inside we’d need to surgically cut one open---not mash it open---to find its face, tail or a polliwog-like entity, so he scooped up another. That’s when a young guy spoiled our fun by using his cell phone to google, “floating green balls in freshwater lakes.” He came up with the name ‘duckweed,’ an aquatic plant that water fowl and people in parts of Asia eat. Normally I love Google but it was more fun imagining those perfectly round, one inch green balls were alien eggs. In our youth we would have had to wait a week---on laundry day back in town---before getting to the library to look something like that up. That’s assuming the oldest guy on the lake front didn’t have an answer for us when we’d bring our ‘prizes’ up to the glider where he always sat. He was our Google Search. No one asks old people stuff anymore.  

Holidays Past: My first kiss from a boy came under the fireworks on the Fourth of July. He was staying with friends at a cottage near ours that summer and the next summer he got me into so much trouble when he put a line of hickies down my neck. I didn’t know what they were but my mom did and I had to wear a turtleneck shirt in the hot July heat until they faded. 

Holidays Present: When I got home from my niece’s house I saw on Facebook that my nephew’s family had grilled bacon wrapped corn on the cob and my oldest niece had just stopped at the cemetery down in Indiana where my grandmother is buried. For all its pitfalls, Facebook is still a wonderful way to keep families within our circle of love when we can’t physically be together. ©


NOTE: The photo at the top is of my brother sitting on the dam we built at our the fort in the woods. We kept our pop cold in the water behind the stones. The photos below are of our fort. In the second photo we kids were looking at a snake by the stream. I'm the one on the left. I didn't like snakes so I wasn't getting any closer.