Summertime Livin’ | Fort Bend Focus Magazine

By Patti Parish-Kaminski, Publisher

Enjoying some porch time with Harper Lee this summer.

Even though I’m grown with a big girl job and no babies at home to entertain, educate and elevate for three months of a sweltering season, summer still reads different. It’s a feeling, a mood, a vibe if you will. I think Ella summed it up best: “Summertime and the livin’ is easy.” Sure, they’re Gershwin’s music and lyrics, but Ella brought them home.

Summer is calmer. Granted the oppressive heat of the South adds to the calm as exertion during June, July and August equals sweating, frizz and the ever-popular heat stroke.

As a child, I spent nearly every summer with Mawmaw and Pawpaw in Northern Louisiana. No air conditioning. No ceiling fans. There was a box fan that was rarely used. Electricity costs money. We made it a priority to attend church every Sunday largely due to the fact that the church had air conditioning. We could get right with Jesus and get cool all at the same time.

As a peri, current, post-menopausal female, I cannot fathom how Mawmaw stood the heat, especially in the kitchen where she cooked daily. And when I say “cook,” I mean fry. Everything was pretty much friend. And it wasn’t like Mawmaw was slight; she was full grown. More real estate to cool off.

Outside chores – gardening, mowing, feeding and such – were done early in the morning or late in the evening. Nothing much was ever accomplished during the “heat of the day.” Mawmaw would watch her stories for two hours post dinner. Dinner is lunch for those born north of the Mason Dixon. Late afternoons were spent on the porch shelling peas, shucking corn and sharing conversation. Conversation was the primary form of entertainment. There was story-telling and gossip sharing. Most of what I know and can depend on as the gospel as a grown woman I learned from those afternoon porch sessions with my grandmother, aunt and assorted neighbors.

If I grew bored with the topic, I read. I read a lot as a child, still do today, much preferring books over people. You can count on a good book, and if you don’t take to it, you can just close it, and put it back on a shelf, perhaps to revisit another day when the mood strikes you. Not so much with people.

I grew up enjoying those lazy summer days where tree-climbing and building a seesaw with my cousins using Pawpaw’s ladder and sawhorse were our pastimes. Pawpaw was a carpenter so there was always a plethora of available materials to create a virtual cornucopia of playthings to pass the time: tires and chain to fashion a tire swing, cardboard boxes, rope and paint to create fast, colorful ponies, sticks to draw hopscotch squares in the red dirt. Our imaginations were our only limit.

There was only one television in the house, dominated early morning by the news and Pawpaw’s game shows. He was a pro at The Price is Right. Afternoons were Mawmaw’s stories, and early evenings was the news again. I remember watching the Watergate trials with Pawpaw in the early 70s. He had lengthy conversations with the Judge from his living room. Pretty much every conversation began with, “By God…”

Perhaps that’s why summer feels different for me each year, reminiscent of the summers of my youth, where life truly was different for three months for a girl being raised in Houston. And you know what? Different really isn’t that bad. In fact, it’s pretty amazing. See y’all next week – on the porch!

Patti Parish-Kaminski