Tuesday was officially the first day of summer, though school has been out for almost a month.
I’ve heard a lot of grousing on Facebook over the past few years about “the good old days,” when kids were let loose to roam on their bicycles on summer days, and they didn’t come home until the streetlights came on.
Being officially old now, I lived through those days in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, and I can attest, they were good.
My parents both worked, but my grandmother lived with us. We lived in a small city, rather than a rural area like Habersham County, but our house was in a quiet subdivision.
My older sister and I spent a lot of time – sometimes with our friends and sometimes just the two of us – riding our bicycles around and around those neighborhood streets. We had a shopping mall within a mile of our house, so when we got older, walking to the mall (by ourselves, of course) was one of our favorite things to do.
We spent a lot of summer days watching TV in the air-conditioned house (after my parents installed air conditioning when I was about 8).
We only had one TV, and during the day, it was always tuned to my grandmother’s “stories.” I learned a lot about life – at least the melodramatic side of life, written by over-imaginative writers – by watching my grandmother’s stories with her.
But we also spent time listening to my grandmother tell her own stories.
She was born in 1904 and had lived through the Great Depression, both World Wars and many other world events. She had a lot of stories to tell, and we were her willing audience.
Those are my summer memories, and I’m grateful for them. It’s true that today, kids don’t have quite as much freedom to just run around and be kids. But there’s something I’ve realized: today’s kids will have their own memories, and in 50 years or so, those will be the “good old days.”
Sure, they’re different from what I experienced. And being a child of the decades I was, my memories are different from those raised in the ‘40s and ‘50s.
I have a 14-year-old at home, and I like to wonder what he’ll remember in 50 years.
Probably, he’ll remember the great lockdown of 2020 and 2021, but there will be better summer memories too: trips we made to the beach … the hot afternoons I sprayed him with the water hose … eating watermelon in the yard and throwing the rinds into the woods … boating on the lake with friends … bouncing on his trampoline … taking short hikes to visit some of our amazing waterfalls … making s’mores in our fire pit.
He’s more likely to remember those things than video games he played and TV shows he watched, but he’s definitely done plenty of that, too.
Our kids’ summers are different than our summers were, and that’s OK. These are their “good old days” in the making.
Kimberly Brown is a staff writer for The Northeast Georgian. Reach her at kbrown@TheNortheastGeorgian.com.