reverie
by lisa horak

Each year the smells of summer transport me back in time to the simpler days of my childhood.

This morning when I went outside to get the newspaper it smelled like what I can only describe as the exact same smell as when I’d wait outside my house for the bus to take me to summer camp when I was seven or eight years old.

When I was young, on summer nights I’d prop the pillow of my twin bed against the wall in my tiny pink, white, and turquoise wall-papered room and I’d read until late in the night. My bed was under the window, which was almost always open, air conditioning being a last resort in the war against the heat and humidity of suburban Baltimore. I could hear the lingering cheers and hollers of older kids playing kick the can in the court up the street, and the chirp of the crickets, and the slams of car doors as people settled in for the evening.

I had a small pink lamp attached to the wall above my bed, which I remember wanting very badly so that when the words eventually became blurry, I could simply reach up and turn out the light without having to get out of bed. I would read to my heart’s content. There was no reason at all not to read until quite late, since there was nothing pressing in the languid summer mornings.

Reading was my escape. I remember reading all the Judy Blume books, then all the mysteries I could get my hands on, and later still Catcher in the Rye, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and The Bell Jar. Eventually teachers sent home summer reading lists, and I’d knock those off in a hurry, during the day. Nighttime was stolen time, just for me. Just me and the sounds and smells of summer, outside my window but seeping in, like the constant humidity.

After late nights—often I’d read compulsively until I finished a book—I would sleep late and wake up to the sounds of my family moving about and to the other sounds of summer. The sound of lawnmowers—fathers, husbands, always the men mowing before the day got too hot—and the sound of basketballs bouncing nearby. With the sounds were the vivid smells of freshly mown grass, of dew and newness, of sweat and of the sun on the sidewalks. There was the smell of honeysuckle and the wisteria tree on our front lawn. These were smells of youth and of freedom.
The neighborhood swimming pool was around the corner from my house and I would walk there, towel draped across my shoulders, flip-flops smacking the asphalt parking lot, while “Afternoon Delight,” “Rhinestone Cowboy” and “Wildfire” blared from the radio over the pool’s loudspeakers.

The changing rooms smelled dank and were always wet—wet floors, wet toilets from wet girls’ bodies who peeled down wet bathing suits only to have to pull and stretch them back up. The suits would leave giant air bubbles in the stomach and they never looked like they had when they were put on dry bodies.

I remember the smell of icy early-morning swimming lessons, of chlorine and Coppertone. I can still picture the Coppertone bottle showing a very sunburned girl and a dog pulling her bathing suit off to reveal a still-white tender bottom. Trucks selling ice cream and snowballs would appear at the pool, dingling their cheery magical bells. For fifty cents you could have a Push-Up or a Fudgsicle or a snowball in an absurd number of flavors. These were the tastes of simple pleasures.

Like all good things, summers end. Each year before school began, my mother would take my brother and me to buy school supplies. I loved selecting each object, loved how they smelled new and fresh. Loved to pick out a pristine three-ring binder, loose-leaf paper, compass, protractor, pencils, pens, rulers and erasers and plastic zip-up pencil case that fit inside the binder. We’d follow that up with back-to-school clothes, new Docksiders and alligator shirts and a new school bag for our books.

The smells of September were very different—old textbooks, disinfected classrooms, buildings that had lain dormant for three months, and the smell of cafeterias gearing up for another year of boiled hotdogs and limp pizza. These are the smells I smell now whenever I enter a school or walk across a college campus, where for me it always feels like September. September meant the renewal of friendships on hold all summer. It meant seeing popular boys to be flirted with and have crushes on. It meant clean notebooks devoid of grafitti. September has always smelled like fresh starts and new beginnings.

Only now my new beginnings happen at random, not on a school calendar. The soundtrack of my life is that of family, of old friends, of mountains, of voices beckoning me to give up my simple summer-languid-lazy mentality and trade it all in for the fresh notebook and a brand new pack of number two pencils with which to write a new beginning.

I often think of those summers long ago. Is this the life I dreamed of then? I do not believe it is, for I lacked the vocabulary then to articulate what and who I have become. The mysteries of life surpass anything Nancy Drew ever encountered.
Summers always end, and Septembers always follow.

Lisa Horak is a stay-at-home mom raising two young daughters, Molly and Isabel. She has written for non-profit organizations and is the co-editor of Heart of the Land and Off the Beaten Path, a fiction and non-fiction anthology of nature writing for The Nature Conservancy. She moved to Asheville last October from Washington, D.C., and is currently working on her first children’s book. [horak@charter.net]