The freedom of summer vacation - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston

Because of the death of Tommy Hunter last week I didn’t write the column I’d intended to write about the last days of school.

 

I remember the tremendous feeling - and probably you do too - when school let out and you had two months ahead with no expectations. I remember how at first we gloried in the freedom from school and expectations and only much later in August found the hot days of summer being exhaustingly long.

 

Of course when I was growing up, so long ago, few mothers had outside jobs. Their jobs were to cook and clean and garden, producing food and preserving it for the winter ahead. Kids today usually have mothers who work outside the home, meaning they need babysitters or are sent off to camp.

 

I grew up on a farm. My wife, Jill, grew up in Scarborough. Both our mothers stayed home to work so we got to play with the neighbourhood kids.

 

So much has changed but when I travel through Mennonite country and see laundry hanging on clotheslines to dry, memories of days gone by return. I remember when we had a wringer-washer where the clothes were cleaned in the washing machine then the water squeezed out of them by the wringer. As I write this, Jill is doing the laundry the modern way, using our washer that washes the clothes and spins the excess water out of them. Next the clothes go into the clothes dryer that dries them. We rid ourselves of the clothesline years ago.

 

I remember only one vacation trip when I was a child, a trip up the Lake Huron shore and a stop in Native country. Summers were such busy times on the farm that usually our biggest holiday was a trip to Strathroy to visit my aunt and uncle.

 

Jill remembers much different summers when she was growing up. Her father had an office job and planned picnics on the weekend. Her mom had to do all the work of packing a lunch and deciding which clothes the kids should wear.

 

For two weeks at the end of July her parents rented a cottage and they enjoyed their time by the lake. Jill became a much better swimmer than I did which became a slight issue after we met and started going out.

 

Mostly, my summers were just a time of freedom when I was too small to be expected to help with farm work. Instead, we roamed the country, building boats to float (we hoped!) in the creek that ran through our neighbour’s farm. We explored like the adventurous explorers we were reading about in school.

 

Come haying time, we played in the hay mow, back in those days when farmers still gathered loose hay. We’d use the hay fork to swing from a high beam, then let go and tumble into the soft hay.

 

Later, when I grew older, I worked for a neighbour in the days when balers first entered the farm world. On the farm I worked on we used small round bales that had to be picked up and loaded onto a flat-rack wagon. It was hard work that left my arms scratched and bloody.

 

When I was younger, my best friend Ross and I played and explored together. As we aged, we went in different directions. He was a year and a bit older and was in high school when I was still in public school. By the time I got to high school he had quit school and took a job miles away. Later he moved out west and worked first of all, in a uranium mine and later trained as a plumber. Meanwhile I stayed in school then trained in journalism.

 

Back to summer vacations today. Our oldest daughter recently retired as a teacher, though she still does some relief teaching. She’s heading to the east coast along with her youngest son who recently finished high school. As a teacher she’s basically had the same sort of summer as her students.

 

Our youngest daughter  home schools her kids and tries to expose them to much of the modern world. Recently they spent much of a week at the Metropolitan Toronto Zoo, studying the animals closely.

 

They also travelled to Kincardine to take in the Scottish Festival and learn about that portion of their heritage.

 

That’s the glory of summer - so much has changed since I was a lad growing up on the farm, but the freedom remains. Kids’ summers often include trips to camp or babysitters as well as time at the family cottage but there’s a sense of freedom, different from the rest of the year when they must obey the rules of teachers and principals.

 

As a retired senior, in many ways I’m on vacation all the time, but there’s not the sense of escaping the rules that kids feel on the last day of school in June. I envy kids who have a sense of freedom as school ends and two months of liberty stretches out ahead.