Summer Soundtracks

What does summer sound like to you? Think of the sounds that take you back to childhood, when one long summer day blended into the next and the idea of school starting again next fall was too far into the future to even think about.

Does your particular summer soundtrack include the hum of skates or bicycle tires on the pavement? The shrieks and splashing of hordes of little kids at the swimming pool? Or maybe the crack of baseball bats?

None of those sounds evoke childhood summers for me. I didn’t have a bicycle or skates. They wouldn’t have been very usable for kids who lived 15 miles from town at the end of rutted gravel and dirt roads.

I do have a few memories of the swimming pool; they just aren’t happy ones. My introduction to swimming involved chilly June mornings, a gaggle of little kids I didn’t know, and an inexperienced teenaged lifeguard whose theory of discipline was to threaten to dunk anyone who acted up. None of that helped me get past my fear of putting my nose under the water. Most of the time my teeth were chattering as much from terror as temperature, and I was always greatly relieved when it was deemed too cold for us to actually get into the water.

Baseball? It’s not a game you learn when the entire student body of your elementary school consists of five kids. I know that my father sometimes was the umpire for neighborhood baseball games, but that was when I was too little to remember much about the games. My only real baseball-related memory is of driving home from a game once after a heavy rain. The lane between the road and our farm was so muddy that half the time the Jeep was driving sideways, and I was very impressed.

Here are some of the sounds that say “summer” to me:

The strongest one is the clear, melodic trill of a meadowlark. That sound takes me back instantly to being in a car, traveling along a gravel road on a prairie summer day, and the sudden sweetness of the meadowlark song caught through the open window.

Another part of my personal summer soundtrack is the crisp rustling and tearing noises of ears of sweet corn being twisted off the stalks and stripped of their husks. Freezing corn was an all-day project, starting with picking half a pickup load of corn first thing in the morning, then husking it, then blanching the ears, cooling them, and cutting the kernels off the cobs. Which brings back another sound—my grandmother’s knife, the blade worn thin from years of sharpening, scraping along the cob to get every bit of the milky half-cooked kernels.

A summer sound that I heard myself just this morning is the plop-plop-plop of chokecherries hitting the bottom of an ice cream bucket. It took me back decades to chokecherry-picking expeditions with my mother, grandmother, and sisters. I reminisced as I stripped all the berries I could reach off of the tree that stands right outside my own front door. Two ice cream buckets full—Grandma would have been proud. Well, until she saw how many leaves and stems ended up in my buckets along with the fruit.

I greatly enjoyed myself, too, in spite of (or maybe because of) missing two sounds that were definitely part of my childhood chokecherry picking experiences. I didn’t once hear the whine of a mosquito buzzing past my ears. And I didn’t once hear the whine of my hot, bored, little-girl self asking, “Haven’t we picked enough yet?”