It's Mater Sammich Time!

"It's a smile, it's a kiss, it's a sip of wine...it's summertime!" - Kenny Chesney   

I just ate the first hand-picked tomato/cucumber sandwich of the season and hung a new hammock in the backyard. Summer has officially begun. The bright taste and rich deliciousness biting into a piece of fresh garden produce brings makes memories of summer pleasures past come flooding back and for me, most of those memories are tied to scents.

The childhood summers smelled of chlorine and sun and bright blue swimming pools. Those were the days before sun screen, so we slathered ourselves with suntan oil that smelled of coconut and spent hours in the sun, going from pool to beach towel and back again. I remember the feel of the warm concrete under my wet beach towel and the hot sun on my face. When I was a child, I was blonde, so by the end of summer my hair had turned green from the swimming pool chlorine, but I didn't care. Back then, all of us blonde kids had green hair in the summertime.

The summer I was seven I learned how to flop off the high dive. I never mastered diving, but I had a pretty good flop and a decent cannon ball. I still remember the fear and exhilaration of looking down at the water, so far below, wondering if I had the courage to jump, taking that final deep breath, then slamming into the water, tapping the bottom of the deep end with the tips of my toes, water in my nose, bubbles surrounding me, then float, float, float to the top and do it all again.

There was a faint cherry, berry, intensely sweet smell of popsicles in the swimming pool air. My favorite were those red, white and blue bullets. They still sell them and I bought one a while back. It didn't taste anything like I remembered, but then summers were larger than life back then.  

One of my grandmothers planted petunias all around her house, every summer - red petunias, purple petunias, pink petunias, white petunias, all kinds of petunias. By mid-day, when the sun was really hot and high overhead, the perfume from those petunias filled her yard. To this day, a hint of hot petunia on the wind sends me back to my Gramma's porch swing, where I lie happily smelling the breeze with my head on her lap. I've planted petunias many times, but mine never smell as good as hers did.

When I was a young mother, my favorite summer smell was the scent of my children's sweaty heads, hair all curly and wet, a bit of dirt, somehow, always mixed in. I loved sitting with my kids, holding them close, pressing my cheeks against those precious little heads...Such a sweet, earthy, poignant aroma, like hope and potential and innocence, all wrapped into one whiff.     

The parenting year summers were full of campfires and roasted marshmallows. There was the scent of the summer rain and the sea and the shore. The gentle hum of the ceiling fans, the whir of the hard-working air conditioner, cicadas buzzing, tree frogs chirping and the low happy sound of voices, talking and laughing outside provided the soundtrack for those days.  

These days summer smells like the warm spicy odor my tomato plants give off, as I walk between their tightly sown rows. Honeysuckle, jasmine and gardenia, a hint of rose, the clean coolness that mist from the garden hose brings as it blows across the breeze. I have a lovely, deep-toned wind chime; from here on out, hearing it will bring these summers back to me. And, there are birds, so many birds of all kinds, flocking to the feeders and bird baths I provide. Sometimes their cheerful chirping, chattering and song is so loud, I have to just stop and marvel at it. So much life, so much joy...it's the sound of summertime.

There have been wonderful summers and ones not so great. There have been fantastic vacation trips and summers where it felt like all I did was yard work. If money were no object, I'd put a swimming pool in, just to experience the smell of chlorine and turn a few of my hairs green again. If time could be turned back, I would sit on my grandmother's lap and smell her petunias again. If memories could be relived, I would spend an afternoon holding my sweaty-headed kids, breathing the scent of their youth again.  

Whatever summer is for you, I wish you the best of it. Enjoy these next few hot, lazy months - the tastes, the scents, the sounds and the memories they evoke. I hope you get a chance to create some new memories with adventures you take and things that you do. We have a fine, full summer planned and our garden is huge and verdant, so there will be no shortage of memories made or tomato/cucumber sandwiches eaten this year.