‘In the Good Old Summertime’

This is the time of year we all look forward to. With the long, warm days, cooking and eating out of doors, trips to the beach, and on and on; it is enough to make one’s heart sing.
This is also the time of family reunions for many of us with that tradition. As for us, my wife’s family gathers in Louisiana, and some of us on the Hall side do so in Pennsylvania, near Scranton, where my father’s family set down roots.
Unfortunately for me this year I was too busy to go with my wife to Louisiana this last week. She was taking extra days to travel with our daughter, Anna-Faith, and her two tiny girls, and that did not work for me…so I stayed home.
Her family gathers at a state-owned camp on Sabine lake, on the Louisiana frontier bordering Texas. The family rents one of the many pods for the weekend, each consisting of a half dozen dorm rooms, each with beds for 40, plus a meeting room, slash dining hall in the center with a large, fully equipped kitchen.
As I sit here I can picture all the sweaty children romping and playing with one another, some fishing, some playing ball, some riding their bikes and others in the pool. The adults are content to let the big kids look after the little ones all day long as they sit in their rockers on the porch with ice tea, catching up over the happenings of the year just gone by.
This was a God-send for Anna-Faith. Little children can be very trying, and to be able to just sit and catch up all weekend with her cousins and aunts and uncles without a care is incomparably refreshing and restoring. The big girls love wagging the little ones around like their little dolls, and the little ones just love all the activity and attention.
It is a wonderfully bonding time for the greater family. When the weekend ended, one granddaughter cried, “I miss my cousins. I miss my cousins….”
I hate it when I have to skip these gatherings, in part because it is a world totally different from life in the Northeast. Nobody I know here works in the oil industry, keeps large gardens, fills their freezers with caught fish, hunted deer and home-grown produce. Since their lives are different, their experiences are different, which makes talking with them very interesting.
Needless to say, I have not had Patricia here to cook for me. But fortunately it is the season for fresh fruit, and since I love it so much, I have eaten little else. I have been unhappy with my bathroom scales lately, but after eating fruit for over a week and losing seven pounds in the process, I have decided I’ll keep them.
Art Hall, publisher