Knowing the half of it
It’s funny how a phrase said more than 50 years ago can stick in your mind.
"Fourth of July; summer is half over."
That’s what my grandfather used to say to me.
He’d never admit whether he was teasing or whether he was spouting an observation based on personal experience. I’d look at him for a clue, and all I’d see was his hand across his mouth as if he was contemplating something major with a twinkle in his eyes that suggested just maybe he was laughing inside.
Year after year, he’d say the same thing, a devastating phrase for a little girl to hear who loved summer and hated school. After a couple of annual spouts of the phrase, I started to dread the sound of him saying it, weeks in advance.
It’s been 51 years since his voice last said the words. Like clockwork, I started hearing "Fourth of July; summer’s half over," playing in my head two weeks ago. It’s happened every year since his death.
That’s when the memories of summers that will never be again come back. It’s when I remember little things like my grandmother giving me the confidence to make pancakes, the scent of blueberry bushes, and the taste of native strawberries sold door to door, by children who carried boxes of them on trays, held close to their bodies by a supporting leather strap.
There’s a row boat in my memories, no more than six feet in length, blue in color, handed down from one child to another until it came to me. I used to launch the boat from the beach into the water of Buttermilk Bay and then row off toward a destination of my choosing. With sun pouring down and the scent of fresh seaweed pulled up by oars, I thought I was in heaven.
Poor boat, it had another side to its life, a side that irritated me. My brothers, slightly older, used to take it out on squid-hunting expeditions. They didn’t have to go far. Disorientated by some unknown act of nature, huge schools of squid spent weeks one summer heading inland toward our beach. My brothers claimed they were herding the squid away with my oars, but I knew what they were doing. They were taunting the squid into releasing black ink, and then taunting me by lifting up the ink-coated oars for me to see. Little did we know that squid ink would one day become a gastronomical delight.
As for the squid, it didn’t seem to matter whether my brothers tried to send them out to sea or left them alone. When the tide went out, the squid came in, beached themselves and beckoned flies. Who cleaned them up, I can’t remember, and neither can my one surviving brother.
Beyond the squid the beach was like a treasure chest, a place of perfect seashells, star fish and sand collars. The sand collars are gone, the starfish have disappeared, and the seashells are different now, fewer in variety, and though it may be my imagination, I don’t think they have the same sheen.
One thing hasn’t changed - the quahogs burrowed deep in the sand. My brothers used to dig them from the beach with their feet and without benefit of a shellfish license. They never thought of the digging as illegal, and we never questioned if the tasty creatures were carrying bacteria. We ate them steamed, bathed in broth, chopped in quahog pie, and adorned with cream in chowder.
Just off shore my brothers and I used to fish from our 12-foot boat; my mother sitting with us as referee. My brothers caught flounder. I caught eels and seaweed.
We ate a lot of fish both caught and bought in the summers of my childhood. It wasn’t costly then, and didn’t come in the huge varieties now found in stores. It came in waves of local catch, scup one day, mackerel or butterfish another.
I don’t remember Fourth of July fireworks in the early summers of my life. We had something better, homemade so to speak. Every summer my brothers and their friends would rake up all the seaweed dried upon the beach, form a huge mountain from it and after dark, without the benefit of a burning permit, turn the seaweed into a giant bonfire. There was a kind of glory to watching the seaweed burn, hearing it softly crackle and smelling the salt it contained as it released into the air. I used to stand there in awe that one night of the year, watching the flames leap up into a darkened sky. I’d see the stars above and think about the stars in the American flag.
And then the fire would die down, gone for another year, and the mosquitoes and gnats would swarm around us. That’s when we found our way home, hoping we wouldn’t pass through poison ivy. That’s when we entered a house that didn’t have a television. It’s when we talked about the best Fourth of July bonfire ever.
Fourth of July and the summer’s half over. Maybe. But one thing is sure: the phrase and memories will be back again next year.
