June 21st

Summer was a special time to my sister and me as children, a time to trap bumblebees in hollyhock blossoms or plan a wardrobe based on the colors of petunias or the sky. We spent every possible moment out-of-doors in the fields which surrounded our house or searching four-leaf clovers in a very lucrative patch in the lawn. Grasshoppers and ants, cloud formations and sunsets, thunderstorms and rolling hills, woodchucks and pheasants, these populated our summer days. Summer nights were often adorned with fireflies and campfires and sparklers left over from the Fourth of July. Our feet were wet from dew both morning and evening. Summer was ‘our time’.

Marbles and rollerskates, bicycles and evening ‘ring-a-levio’ games with the neighbor kids were part of it. Gardening with Grandma or Daddy, canning with Mother as we grew older, these kept us occupied and out of trouble during those long summer days

Ever present with us were the thoughts that it was all God’s creation and His way of dealing with us through our parents and our circumstances, because we were His. Our parents and our grandparents and our aunts and uncles were the stable, God-fearing people of our lives.

SUMMER (From Four Who Come)
When Spring’s sister Summer comes
And settles on the land
To ripen grain and flesh out plums
And heat the seashore’s sand,
She holds the sun to longer days
And heats the sultry dark.
She flings the evening star to blaze
While fireflies dim and spark.
She lolls upon the meadow grass
And beckons clouds to form,
Then piles them, towering, as they pass
To birth a thunderstorm.
Her heavy, fragrant days emerge
At dawn with dewdrops kissed,
To lie ’til day and night converge
Into a twilight mist.

Prayer: Thank You, God, for the Christian family whom You gave me and for my special memories of summer as a child.