I am sitting, legs sprawled across the front porch, fanning my face with my newspaper against early summer’s stifling heat.
My grandmother is making sun tea. She fills a jar with cool water, sprinkles in the tea leaves, sealing it shut and setting it on the table in the sun.
“There isn’t a breeze that blows through Kentucky on days like this,” she says, wiping the back of her forehead with her hand.
Her neighbor’s grandson is tilling up an area in the front yard for her summer flower garden and we watch as he works, the hum of the tiller drowning out the sound of tractors moving across the farm behind her house. Across the street, Mrs. Francis picks blackberries off the vine that grows on the fence around her yard. She’s making a blackberry pie that she’ll bring over after dinner tonight.
My grandmother spritzes a bouquet of flowers with a spray bottle that we’ll take and place on my grandfather’s grave this afternoon along with an American flag in honor of Memorial Day. Watching her arrange the flowers I can see my grandfather sitting in the chair next to her as he always used to do – smoking his pipe and reading the newspaper or slapping the mosquitoes that land on his arm.
I slap a mosquito that lands on my own arm and itch the place where it landed thinking about my grandfather. My tshirt is clinging to my body in the thick heat and I wonder what he’d be doing if he was still around. I wonder how living here for the summer would be different if it was the three of us.
My grandmother sits down beside me, talking to me about people I don’t know and telling me stories from her childhood that this day has conjured up and I nod and laugh on cue. Finally silence falls between us and we sit there listening to the tiller, watching Mrs. Francis and thinking about things that seem lifetimes away.
“We’ll go to the baseball game after while,” my grandmother says, snapping me back to the front porch. “It’ll raise up our moods. Ball park is good for things like that.”
The little league ball park is good for nachos, too, I think to myself as I nod in agreement.
It’s one of those slow summer days that I remember spending here with my grandparents during summers when I was younger. The clock seems to tick slower than usual, people move past us more leisurely. Even the birds are casual in their flight.
“It’s going to be a hot summer,” my grandmother says as she goes inside to flip the tape in the tape deck. As the door closes behind her a wave of cool air flows out and I wedge my foot in the doorway to maintain the breeze. “Close that door child, you’re letting the bought air out.”
I smile and pull my foot from the door. Yes, I remember summers like this.
