Wandering through One's Memories

A couple of weeks ago, I had the grandbabes at my house on a Friday evening. It was a dusky pre-summer evening, 8ish, and we were playing outside with balls. For some reason, they've named this game we created "War". It involves pots and pans and bouncy rubber balls. And the best part? It gets rid of lots of energy!!

As we were playing outside, I was suddenly transported in my memories back to my summer vacations spent in the Chicago 'burbs.

My aunt lived in Winnetka or Wilmette, I never can remember. (My uncle's podiatrist office was in one 'burb and they lived in the other. Unfortunately, both cities begin with the same letter, so how am I to differentiate?!) Every summer my mother would pack me into the car and we'd leave Maitland at 4:00 a.m. I don't remember any motel stops along the way, but Google maps tells me the journey is 19 hours, using interstates. So it must have been a three-day drive with no interstates and only one driver. The fact that we left at 4:00 a.m. so as to be out of Florida by 8:00 a.m. tells me we must not have had air conditioning in the car. (Time reference: late 50s, early 60s.)

We didn't have Daylight Savings Time in Florida in that era, and the summer sun would set around 7:30 during the summer. And at our home in Florida, we had palm trees, cypress trees, oak trees, and a citrus grove. I had never seen a weeping willow before we visited Chicago.

My aunt and uncle's house was a couple of doors away from an enormous park—blocks and blocks of grass and trees and children playing all day long and into the night. And the sun didn't set until 9:00 or 10:00, according to my childhood memories.

It was a magical place. Just to have a day that lasted almost into the next day was a strange experience. And the trees and smells and sites. We'd go to the museums in Chicago. We'd drive to the lakeshore. We'd take a day and drive to Wisconsin to visit another aunt. It was a world apart from what I experienced as a child.

And here I am, again in the northwest, where the soft evening light and the smells of evergreens and sycamores and lilacs are at once familiar and unfamiliar.

How strange to have returned to my childhood summers again.