man sylvia I wish I had lived with you!!!...you would have been my bestest friend..lol!!!
We "camped" in tents...on the river....we built a campfire...and cooked the fish we caught during that day in an iron skillet and over the campfire....we peeled patatoes and did.."camper fries"..the best in the whole world...still cant duplicate them!!!
We bathed in the river.....we sang around the campfire...we had a blast..and we wore bug spray....but it was soo good...we actually went after dark and took a flashlite and did frog-giggin.....and helped my mom fry frog legs..they were great!!!....
We slept in our underwear......noone cared!!..lol..and laughed and giggled all nite.......until my dad demanded.."ENOUGH".."GO TO SLEEP"..which meant shut up!!..or you'll get your hiney spanked..LOL
What fun..and sad to say..my kids have never learned this..but I truely believe it made me a stronger person today...sigh..dang I should have taught my kids the basics......
I should have done this too!!!!!
What fun...what a lesson we didn't even know we were learning!!!!
Dena

More importantly......ask yourself why the rituals changed.....and if the change has been good or not so good?

We can't live in the past......but we can demand that life be better in the future......and we can look at reality, and make intelligent choices, if we so choose. (Or we can simply do nothing.....or ignore the warning signs......or deny there is a problem.)

A HO.

"Yes, I am so old that I can remember when only rich people had their own pools." Isn't that still the case? Or is it that only people in debt up to their eyeballs have pools, now? ;-)

My childhood summer rituals were, if I wasn't doing what Sylvia did, I was playing in the sprinklers, and when I got a little bit older, sunbathing. No matter where we lived at the time, I was always outside. I might have been hiking around in the mountains, looking for caves, playing with ant hills (not fire ants) climbing anything I could manage to climb, and doing all the tomboy things I could manage.

My current summer rituals definately include finding the shadiest parking space, picking tomatoes, squash and zucchini and wondering what to do with it all, watching the butterflies, hummingbirds and other critters take advantage of the bounty provided to them in my back yard.

I like both summer rituals, my childhood's and my current ones.

Sally

Digging "forts" in the desert floor to escape the extreme heat.(no trees to speak of alas no tree houses....)
Praying for heavy rains to fill fort that was sunken to go "swimming". Swimming in real pools. Learning that the white paint marks on the black top on the way to the pool would cool your feet enough to keep going.(Why did we hate shoes enough to burn our poor feet!) Wandering around in my mom's fruit trees and vegies looking for snacks! Yum!
Getting up early to go hiking around in the desert looking for reptiles,bugs etc... in summer before it got really hot. I'll just bet kids in West TX did the same thing.PJ

I agree, Rick.

We can't live in the past.

but many of these summertime rituals are current!

& I bet more of 'em could be, if we just remembered to remember to do them.

Remember Weldon's post about homemade ice cream?

Many of those rituals were time reliant, and in today's mad house world of do ever more and more......time is in short supply.

The human overload should cause implosion at any time.

Worst part is....the world doesn't want to let you off!

Well, instead of every Sunday, the whole family only gets together for the cemetery cleaning day.The whole clan does show up tho, if the are physically able.
When GS comes we try to do a lot of the things I did when I was younger because he's not allowed to bring any computer games.
Weather permitting we fish in stock tanks and picnic
He loves to play croquet but he always knocks mile ball as far as he can, lol
I was always following my GF around and he follows us around like that, lol

When I was a kid (growing up in Houston):

The skeeter truck. Back then, in another dispensation, they REALLY sprayed for skeeters...you could not drive down the road behind the skeeter truck..it was like being in a fog.

Early afternoon rains...every afternoon..you could set your watch by them. One year I did not have to water once.

Water Wiggles and Slip N Slides (remember them)...who had a pool???? Or if you were REALLY poor..you just ran thru the sprinklers.

Gettin so hot playing, you got a headache, even tho you drank a ton of water from the water hose.

When we lived in Dallas for 4 years during the 80s...I missed shade trees and skeeter trucks so bad!!!

We had a black gunite pool - hated the thing because you couldn't see the water moccasins. Dang near walked on water after coming face to face with one! Everyone was always at my house, partly because we did have a pool and partly because my folks were usually at work!

Summer rituals - going to Clyde every July 4th to see the rest of the family. Hanging out at Baird Lake, sliding down the storm celler door and burning our tails, homemade ice cream, pecan fights (ouch), hovering around the bathtub full of ice to cool off and learning about the important things while sitting around the kitchen table.

Summer rituals - in Cypress I was a fixture at Tin Hall, we went to buckouts on Saturdays in Simenton, 'cruised' Westheimer, buckouts on Wednesdays at Gold Mesa, hoped to sneak past momma when we came in hours past curfew, cleaning the garage/mowing the lawn/cleaning the pool for getting caught*, camping and hunting with my family and friends. *Momma ALWAYS had a glass of iced tea in her hand. Never knew she was there until she rattled that glass - you were busted, your fate sealed and she never had to say a word!

We didn't watch tv unless it was raining and we were tired of UNO or playing pool. We were always involved with family and friends and were usually outdoors. Not much has changed except I try not to crawl on four-legged beasties with bad attitudes anymore. The ground is less forgiving than it used to be! Actually, I think I'm turning into my grandmother - either cooking or in the yard :)

Sylvia - the dirt road comment flushed a memory up from the depths

The dust on the dirt road was soft as talc. When you put your foot down on it, it fluffed up between your toes all soft and warm.

Back when horny toads roamed Oklahoma - I would walk to the middle of the wheat field, and stake out a room by mashing down a circle of wheat. You could lean back on the still-standing walls of what and look at the bright blue circle of sky above.

I know - smashing wheat wasn't probably the right thing to do - but it never entered my mind that it had another use.

Did anyone ever bury a time capsule for an afternoon's fun?
Wonder if anyone's ever found that jar of "important things" I buried in the pasture. And Jack LaLanne says uh-1 and uh-2.

Great thread Sylvia,
WOW, this really takes me back and I like remembering the good times.
For our family summers usually held the anticipation of our grandparents and cousins coming down from Colorado. Once they arrived everyday was filled with thing's we'd be doing, Getting together with other family members for visits, sometimes a family reunion, a day at Six Flags for free YES free my dad worked for a company that gave tickets for Six Flags as well as free meal tickets, Nights times were the best all us kids would run around chasing each other, we'd smash coke cans on our heals and run around in the street or sidewalk to make noise.
Granddaddy always made homemade ice cream but I didn't like it, call me funny or strange but I loved Ashburns Ice cream YUMMMMMMMMMMMMY. We always had to have a watermelon too yummmmmy.
We went swimming at our favorite swimming place and I loved their chilly dogs after a few hours of swimming I would head up to the Concession Stand for a chilly dog and a coke.
Being a child was so much easier than being the grow up and more fun LOL
We lived in a very small house so when our grandparents and cousins came down all 6 of us kids had to sleep in the living room on cots. I'm sure we kept everyone up talking till we were told to shut up.
One year they'd gotten us kids a slip and slide wasn't much fun landing on the grass at the end of the runway LOL.
On the summers that we'd go up to Colorado to see them we'd go up in the mountains to Cripple Creek to tour the town and down to Co. Springs to see Garden of the God's and tour caves. On picnics we always had fried chicken, potato salad, beans, fruits. We ladies do have it easier with the cooking part, I can remember mom or grandmother cooking fried chicken to take to the picnic, while the others would bring salads and stuff.
Now I just stop off at chicken express.
When my mom would send me up to the corner store for a few items I would sometimes come across a horny toad on the way home and I'd place it in the sack. Mom never mind cause she was a tomboy like me, she'd just take the toad out of the sack and set it free.

Catching tadpoles in the drainage ditches. Having horseapple (bodock tree fruit) fights....yuck if you happened to get hit with one! Playing "wolfman" - hide and seek at dusk! :-) Dusk's shadows made it "scary"....
Drinking from the water hose. (I couldn't imagine doing that now!) Yep, the community swimming pool. And running through the sprinklers, Slip 'n' Slide, Mr. Wiggle, and collecting coke bottles from the roadside ditches to buy another coke and maybe some candy - the bottles were worth 3 cents each!

Those were the days!!! And I was such a tomboy! Always barefoot. Always outside. Sigh....

Yep, TGL, I remember those soft dusty roads very well!

Some of my mother's "people" lived in East Texas, where they had oil roads instead of dirt roads.

The oil was supposed to keep the dust down, but it smelled like a refinery, & you had to use a solvent to get the dirt off your feet!

Barb, I 'member them watermelons!

Mr Honea was an old guy (musta been in his fifties for crying out loud...) who drove his ancient pick-up truck to the farms in East Texas & loaded it with produce to sell door-to-door in our little town.

Summer afternoons, after he completed his route, he opened his fruit & vegetable stand, very conveniently located on our farm-to-market road.

The *best* summertime experience was a watermelon (sometimes an exotic yellow one!) from his old metal soft-drink cooler.

He put the melons in at night, filled the cooler up with ice, & next day those things were truly ice-cold!

How scrumptious is was in those un-air-conditioned days, to bite into an ice-cold watermelon!