OK, tomorrow if I start complaining of digestive insult, remind me I am sitting here with a bowl of cherries and it was all my fault.

I love cherry season.

Summers about that age...well, either running loose in the neighborhood, on our swingset, in the tractor tire sandbox, or the whole neighborhood in one of our many pools (cheapy pools filled from the hose.) Or digging for dinosaurs in the overflow ditch behind the houses. Smell of mud, really. NM mud and wet limestone. Mmm. The skin-tightening burn of NM heat and being 4000 ft closer to the sun than I am here.

The other that pings (mainly because I'll be back there for the first time in over a decade) is the farm in MN at twilight, running around with the cousins in the yard and family garden, playing Ghost and Starlight, Starbright. I only vaguely remember the rules. The parents would be sprawled in various webbed aluminum fram chairs, drinking suntea. It smelled of...farm. And pigs. Oh lord, it smelled of pigs. My uncle has at least 4 barns now. But you really do stop smelling it after about 5 minutes. The smell of the crabapples (which tasted like ass, but smelled so good!), cucumbers off the vine, sweet corn straight off the stalk (gotta pick those nasty worms off!) and blood and raspberries (because those bushes are evil!) Hot alfalfa and wheat fields.

Heather, I also grew knowing my maternal cousins fairly closely, despite us being scattered all over the US (and sometimes overseas as well.) Because of where I grew up, this didn't seem out of place (hispanic community there keeps family close.) Weird to think it isn't a norm.

There was a Dairy Queen where we could get those cones with the hard chocolate shells if we just went on an adventure through her neighborhood.

Ours was A&W, which I was only allowed to bike to with dad. Well, I think it closed before I was actually biking under my own power, but I still remember the view from the bright yellow plastic bikeseat mounted on the back of the green schwinn. It was a pretty touring bike.

When I got older, it was the Sonic on the corner of Valley and Picacho.

I love cherry season.

Me, too. That reminds me I need to get some.

I still have my entire Breyer horse collection, which might be worth somethng if they weren't all "well loved" (i.e. scuffed to hell). I think I had/have upwards of 40 of them.

My summers were all about summer camp, the kind you see in kids' movies. Summer was capture the flag on Sundays and Thursday night variety shows; it was freezing cold swimming lessons in the pond far too early in the morning and bright red bug juice with dinner. It was camp songs after meals and evening vespers around a roaring campfire. It was my first kiss (to a Brit, no less) and my first job. I had my first sweet sixteen summer love under those pine trees, and I learned that even when I was a complete outcast back in my "real life" at school, there was a place that I belonged. The end of camp was the end of summer and the return to a life that seemed as faded as my duffle bag after the brightness of the August sun.

In Jamaica, the ice cream came to us in the form of guys riding bicycles yelling "Nutty buddy! Nutty buddy!" Grapenut icecream was a big favourite.

The sno-cone came on carts, and those were restricted to the city areas, where we didn't go so much during the summer (although I was bussing to school during the term).

Also wending their way through our streets were herds of cows (we'd make a big to do of trying to spot bulls and panicking anyone dressed in red -- it was proper etiquette to freak out when so designated -- there was too much doubt for bravado).

Sometimes we'd just sit on the pillars from which our front gate swung and wave at people who drove or walked by.

More often than not they waved back. London was a bit of a shock in that regard.

I could not believe my husband didn't know about how old his cousins were, what they were doing, that he'd sometimes not talked to them in years and had no idea how they were. This is not our way.

My closest/favorite cousin is in Seattle right now, but I'm all up on her son's development and whether or not he's a Saints fan-which he is.

ETA: Evidence, and to brag on the little bugger a bit

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From the time I was five until I was in 8th grade, my cousins came over every weekend (or just about) so my uncle could help take care of my grandfather.

Edit: 2 of my (then) five first cousins.

We used to go up to the mountains 90 miles east or so where there were u-pic-em cherry orchards. One year we made the mistake of drinking cherry juice while picking (as well as eating every third cherry picked.)

Lord we had to make a lot of emergency stops on the way home. That stuff will go right through you!

I could not believe my husband didn't know about how old his cousins were, what they were doing, that he'd sometimes not talked to them in years and had no idea how they were.

Oh, god, this is me. But I have an assload of first cousins, and second cousins are mostly like first cousins, so they make it a metric buttload.

I can tell you who's had kids, and what country most of them are in, but the ones I can give you precise ages on are the ones I've lived with, pretty much. And I'll be damned if I can keep up with even their lives.

Ten years old, let's see.

There were no other kids in my neighborhood because everyone was near my parents' age (most of them were my dad's brothers and sisters), and back then children born to 38-year-old mothers and 41-year-old fathers were unusual enough to remark upon. So I played by myself, which suited me fine.

I'd go outside in the morning before the summer heat got excessive and run barefoot around the yard. My feet loved the cool, dewy grass best but were strong and calloused enough to run across the gravel drive without hesitation. I had a bicycle that was a racehorse and a swingset that served as every spaceship imaginable.

Later I'd come inside and sit in front of the window air conditioner in the dining nook and let the cold air blow across my face while I read. I'd just fallen in love with the Chronicles of Narnia. I read them over and over again, along with National Geographics and every Time Life science book the local library had. Cave men and astronomy were my favorite topics. Sometimes I read whatever my mom brought from the library--lots of Catherine Cookson, Belva Plain, and Eugenia Price.

If Dad was on evening or night shift, he'd work in the garden in the morning, and bring in a big, ripe watermelon, still dusty from the red clay it grew in, and set it on the floor by the air conditioner. After lunch Dad would cut the watermelon into quarters and we'd go on the porch and eat it, spitting the seeds into the azalea bushes. I was never any good at distance seed-spitting, but I loved the sweet, bright flavor of the melons. Even now nothing tastes more like summer. And when we were done it was my privilege to get out the hose and rinse away the sticky juice, and no one cared how wet I got.

After supper when the sun sank and the heat waned, I'd go outside again, to ride more Triple Crown races on my bicycle or to pretend I was an Indian child as I ran through the field above the garden. Spare beanpoles made teepee frames, or, broken in half, light sabers or swords as my fantasy demanded. I looked with longing at the woods behind the house, but they were forbidden in the summer, when water moccasins might lurk in the slow, muddy creek. When it grew too dark, I came inside to rejoin my books until bedtime came.