July: A Memoir

Time and place conspire to form our memories.

Memories, of course, continue to be shaped as we go on in life. And time has a way of altering place. Coming back to Ohio—"my place,” the place of my childhood—after forty-some years of other places, I found my familiar landmarks missing. I was a stranger in a strange land. Could I make it my place again? I wondered.

Here used to be the hill above our farm and the road down it where we children careened on our bikes. That hill is gone now—rather, the road has been curved to avoid the hill, which now sits overgrown and lonely without a single child on a bicycle, her heart in her mouth.

Here, unrecognizable except in my mind’s eye, used to sit the farmhouse and the big yard, the barn and its bigger yard, all of which filled my universe from birth through high school. They have been supplanted by a hundred houses with a hundred small back yards.

But—we were blessed with space. And in July, we took full advantage of it. School was out for a heavenly three months, and July was the peak of our summer.

Some memories I recall with vividness; others are blurred, and I need to ask my compatriots at the time to tell me their memories of the same shared experience. Four of us, let us say, can grow up in the same place and time, with the same parents, on the same plot of land—and remember occasions differently. My own specific “four” would be my two brothers, my sister, and myself.

Sarah Orne Jewett has written of a particular time and place in her brief novel, The Country of the Pointed Firs. Its story is set in the late nineteenth century in the state of Maine. A writer goes to a coastal town for a quiet place to write and becomes embroiled, instead, in a closely-knit group of colorful relationships with all their eccentricities and foibles and all their seeming contradictions. And, indeed, with all their memories of their pasts, telling them back and forth to each other, with her as a willing listener:

“There, it does seem so pleasant to talk with an old acquaintance that knows what you know. I see so many of these new folks nowadays, that seem to have neither past nor future. Conversation’s got to have some root in the past, or else you’ve got to explain every remark you make, an’ it wears a person out.”

My mother-in-law, who, throughout her nineties loved to dwell on her crystal-clear memories, bemoaned the fact that there was no one living who remembered her childhood with her. Her two younger sisters were still very much alive, but they were too young to have her memories. She had to “explain every remark.”

I query my brothers and sister from time to time: “Is that how you remember it?”

As for the Julys of my youth, my memory does not fail me.

July, here in Ohio, means hot. I don’t like hot. But it also means the chicory’s fringed blue blossoms along the roadsides and the tall, creamy Queen Anne’s Lace, a perfect foil. These were pointed out by my aunt, who would take us four children on “nature walks” along our little-traveled road to a copse of trees beyond my Grandpa’s oat field. She knew flowers and birds and trees, and I have her to thank for awakening my interest and my knowledge.

July means thunderstorms at a moment’s notice. In a perfectly sunny, cloudless sky, Cumulus fluffs can suddenly billow all over the heavens. Maybe they will threaten and drop rain, maybe they won’t. They frequently spoiled my teenage hopes for a tan, lying on a beach towel in the back yard. I would time my turnings: fifteen minutes on my back, fifteen on my stomach. Clouds would invariably cheat one side or the other.

July means mosquitoes. As a child, I'd count the bites on my legs, twenty-five or so on each. Mother would sprinkle citronella oil on our sheets and pillowcases when we went to bed. My nose wrinkled at the smell, but I knew it was for a good cause.

July means lightning bugs and cicadas. The lightning bugs were as good as sparklers on a summer evening, and we children used to catch them in Mason jars with holes punched in the lids. Abandoned cicada shells clutching tree trunks were fascinating: how did the cicadas get out of that small slit in the back? Our elders would sit in lawn chairs, talking long into the long evening, while we played tag around their chairs, quite possibly disrupting serious conversation. The cicadas’ rasping noise almost drowned it out anyway.

July means play. The cat, earlier today, came sauntering up the gravel walk with a garter snake dangling from her mouth. Seeing her—and it—through the bars of my deck railing, I let out a yelp. She dropped the snake. But as it uncoiled itself and began to move, she pounced. Let it go again, pounced again, and kept toying with it till it crawled between the flagstones and disappeared. Even in the heat of July, the cat likes to play. Children, too, seem undaunted. Both cats and children can play in the heat, unlike me, now an adult.

Chores were a necessary part of July, but between tasks, my siblings and I knew how to play. The stones of the gravel driveway that circled the big yard were sharp on our bare feet, but by the end of summer, our feet were calloused, and we didn’t notice. We played in the dusty barn, jumping into piles of scratchy hay in the hayloft. We played in the playhouse under the sprawling oak. It became a post office or a grocery store or whatever we could imagine. We swung on the wooden board swings with their long ropes slung between two tall pines in the front yard. We played. That’s what July was for.

July means corn on the cob! Nothing is so mouthwatering as those first, tender ears, slathered with butter. Mother used to make a meal of crisply fried bacon, sliced tomatoes from the garden, and freshly-picked sweet corn, cooking the ears in a large enamel pan, just three minutes after they came to a boil, piling a platter high for her family of six. We girls ate maybe three or four ears; the boys would eat six or seven. Daddy, to the consternation of Mother, would throw his finished cobs over his shoulder onto the back porch to make us laugh. He could get away with it; we could not.

July means the drone of a prop plane. Summer afternoons, flat on my stomach on Grandma’s porch swing reading Nancy Drew, probably, or The Little Maid of Narragansett Bay, or Black Beauty, a prop plane interrupting my reverie was the sound of mystery and adventure. How I wanted to be up in that endless blue! But I was earthbound, never dreaming that someday, I would fly and fly and fly until flying no longer held the romance I’d imagined. I still scan the skies when I hear an airplane. But that familiar two-engine drone takes me back to the porch and the swing and the book and the long summer afternoons.

It is July in Ohio, and I am drowsy in the heat. Maybe a book—a nap on the swing—dream-tangled thoughts—

But—"I remember the melted summers and the cat...” i

It is July.

i From the poem "Nobody But Me Would Remember," 1964.