THE MAGICAL JOYS OF SUMMER

THE MAGICAL JOYS OF SUMMER 

BY HEIDI JOHNSON-WRIGHT

The summer just before I turned eight years old was magical. Many mornings I awoke to the shimmery song of cicadas, the background music of Cleveland summers. Our house was on a street that had been developed for years, but just a block away was several miles of woods. Within a year or two it would sprout tract houses like mushrooms. Until then, it was my private nature preserve.

I spent many days divining careful paths among the trees, stepping over fallen branches, enchanted by the oblique angle of sunbeams through the canopy. My dad had taught me basics about botany and bugs, showed me where to look for little treasures. Green May apples grew under bowed leaves near the forest floor. Spider webs glistened with dew.  An overturned log would reveal a world of grubs, worms and scurrying wood lice. I would find sassafras trees, crush a few of their hand-shaped leaves between my fingers and drink in the earthy smell of tea.

In June, I went with my dad to city hall to buy a pool pass. A functionary upsold us on a season pass for the whole family for $40. My dad went for it, and a few minutes later, I was holding a warm laminated piece of pink cardboard. It was my ticket to unlimited admissions to the public pool at the end of our street. Although my sister and brother went just a few times, and my parents never went, my dad more than got his money’s worth from me alone.

I often went to the pool three times a day. After my morning swim class, I came home for lunch and returned in time for the 1pm opening bell. With pool pass pinned to my towel, I’d park my bike in the rack in the parking lot, and sprint into the girls’ bathroom (labeled “Gulls”; the boys’ was labeled “Buoys”) where I’d pretend to take the required pre-swim shower.

Next order of business to was to stake out a claim with my towel. Cement or grass was the choice; I almost always chose cement. Although I disliked having to exit the pool during the obligatory 20-minute adult swim each hour, I cherished stretching out on my belly on the hot pavement. The heat would immediately vaporize the droplets off my skin, filling my body with a warm, relaxing buzz like the feeling I would later get from a shot of whiskey.

My friends and I made up crazy underwater games, such as charades, seeing who could scream the loudest, and striking fashion poses. We always opened our eyes underwater and never wore goggles, nose plugs or earplugs. Such things were for sissies and losers and thus out of the question. Our hard line on this issue meant we’d return home from the pool with blood-red eyes stinging from chlorine and droplets of water temporarily obstructing our hearing.

Evenings at the pool were my favorite time. Fewer people meant shorter lines at the slide and boards, and more room to myself. As twilight began tingeing the sky with pastel pink and periwinkle, the underwater lights came on. This was the time for floating languorously on my back, gazing skyward. What would it feel like, I wondered, to ascend like the Apollo astronauts to the moon? I had savored the chewy, chocolate space sticks they ate aboard Skylab and drunk many glasses of Tang. I’d assembled a tiny toy moon rover, powered by twisting a rubber band, from a box of Cheerios. But what would it feel like if the sky was literally no longer the limit? 

When the final bell signaled closing time, my exhausted legs could barely lift me up the ladder. I felt like I’d landed on Jupiter and weighed 1,000 pounds. My three-minute bike ride home seemed infinitely long, the whole world cast in languid slow motion.  

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