Anyone ever sleep out on the porch as a kid? I did.....Summer Slumber Nat King Cole once sang about those ‘Lazy, Hazy, Crazy Days of Summer.’ But I think Danny and Sandy, of ‘ Grease’ fame knew better when they harmonized, Ahhhhhhh - those su-u-mer ni-ghts! I remember those nights being ushered in by vibrant sunsets filtering through the crabapple thicket that was next door to my house in West Derry. We liked to think of that thicket as our ‘forest’, and many dragons were slain there. It was also the battleground of the famous West Derry Cowboy and Indian Wars. After the supper table was ‘red off’, the dishes were ‘worshed’, dried and put away, (my brother and I took turns to earn our allowance) we would join our parents on the back porch. This is where they would take turns reading the two sections of the Latrobe Bulletin and daddy would do the crossword puzzle. My mom and dad liked to sit on the back porch swing in the late afternoon after supper. It may have had more to do with not having air conditioning than it did with enjoying the twilight, but whatever the reason, we spent many summer evenings out there. There was always a collection of mayonnaise or pickle jars sitting next to the Bergman’s milkbox on that back porch. Each jar had holes punched in its lid. As the brilliant colors faded from the sky and the first evening star made its appearance, we would scope out the yard, our jars at the ready, waiting for the first twinkle of a lightning bug - and the race was on! How many could we catch, was followed by the dilemma of what to do with them once they were caught. We came up with some pretty inventive, and sometimes gory solutions. Don’t believe the stories about being able to catch enough to read by. At least we were never successful at it. But they did cast enough light to allow me ‘decorate’ myself to look pretty glamorous. I won’t go into a lot of detail, so suffice it to say, I looked very bejeweled in the evening dusk of my backyard - from my glow-in-the-dark sparkling earrings, to the bright gemstones that adorned my fingers! We would add sticks, grass and two inches of water to the jars so we could see how lightning bugs would behave the next day in the sunlight, since we never could find them during the daytime. Usually they were floating in the water come morning. During the afternoons, we would use these same jars to catch fat, slow-moving bumble bees as they drifted from flower to flower. After I had managed to catch five or six, I loved to hold the jar to my ear and feel the vibrations from those furious bees. Mom would call out the door, Don’t come crying to me when you get stung! That warning probably triggered my cautious nature and I would loosen the lid and toss the jar out into the grass. How those bees would spin and sputter angrily before taking off for the neighbor’s flowers. Around the fourth of July, daddy would bring home skinny little boxes of sparklers. It didn’t occur to anyone that the temperature of them was hot enough to weld with. Mom just told us to be careful and not to touch the tip, because it was hot. I don’t remember anyone I knew ever getting burned with a sparkler. We loved them, especially when we ran through the yard in the dark, twirling them over our heads in circles. But they were not nearly as much fun as daddy’s cherry bombs. And believe me, they were not the same tiny crackling cherry bombs you get today. When he lit the fuse and threw one of them out into the yard you could hear the echo from that boom over two ridges. They also left a nice sized divot in the grass. Come twilight on those warm summer evenings, our yard seemed like it attracted a million fireflies, and they would blink out their secret codes in an ever rising dance to the treetops. Just past those treetops, the star-filled skies of summer would majestically burst into view. We didn’t have street lights near our back yard, so the starlight had no competition, and that milky way really went on forever. We would lay in the cool grass and try to identify the constellations, or even more exciting, try to catch a fleeting glimpse of Sputnik, as it circled the globe. We were sure it had to pass over West Derry. I never managed to identify any constellations except the big dipper, and still can’t, to this day. Sometimes, after the sun had faded away, we would play ‘ghost’. Someone would drape one of mom’s old white lace tablecloths over their head. The rest of us would walk around the yard until we got close to the ghost, then he would chase us to our ‘safe base’ on the porch, screaming all the way in the darkness. We also played ‘light tag’. Whoever was ‘it’ had a flashlight and would close their eyes at home-base and count to 100 by 5s while everyone else would hide. I remember hiding by the huge honeysuckle vines that trailed up our front porch and how their perfume hung heavy in the night air. Whoever was ‘it’ would then go looking and when they spotted someone, that beam of light would render them ‘out’. We kept searching until everyone was either caught or made it back ‘home’ free by touching home-base. I remember racing across the yard in my bare feet through the cool, damp evening grass, then stepping onto the sidewalk and being surprised by the warmth of that afternoon’s sunshine, still lingering there. Often on those sweltering summer evenings we would sleep out on the porch, sometimes the front porch and sometimes the back. We had no sleeping bags, just our pillows and blankets and maybe an outdoor cushion or two to spread our blankets on. We were serenaded to sleep with lullabies sung to us by the tree frogs, or ‘peepers’ as we called them, that lived in the marsh across the street. When they harmonized with the crickets, it created a most wonderful and soothing song. Most nights, I didn’t last too long on the back porch. The adventure wore thin pretty quickly with the first howl of a neighbor’s dog or a rustling noise from the crabapple ‘forest’. At that hour, my bedroom had cooled off enough and I would run back in the house where my mom was waiting to tuck me in. On some of those evenings, Bill Burns of KDKA Channel 2 fame had informed us that the weather forecast called for thundershowers. His weather bulletins would send us scurrying to set up our old tent in the back yard. On rare occasions we would fall asleep and actually spend the whole night in that tent. By 8:00 A.M., under the broiling morning sun, it didn’t seem like it had been such a great idea.... you could have boiled eggs in there. Sleeping on the front porch wasn’t always a success either. The traffic at 7 A.M. going up and down Fourth Avenue would also send us scurrying back to our beds for a few more hours sleep. In junior high, my girlfriends and I would have midsummer ‘pajama parties.’ My first one was at Judy Sylvester’s house on Second Avenue, just up the street from second ward school; it was 1962. We would pack up our blankets, pillows, 45 records, and hair rollers, stored in our cute little Kurler Kaddies. One of our dads would go around the neighborhood picking us all up and dropping us off at the designated hostess’ house. We would all put on our baby-doll pajamas, dance to our records, and giggle and laugh until our sides ached. After the parents went to bed, we would make prank phone calls, or even worse, the most forbidden calls of all...to BOYS!! None of us was ever allowed to call a boy on the phone. That would make us look too forward, and seem like we were chasing him, and our moms told us that everyone knew boy’s HATED that. After all, we didn’t want to get a ‘fast’ reputation, did we? We didn’t want people to think we were ‘boy-crazy’ did we? This is one of the lectures we got from our moms all the time. These lectures were endured silently on our parts. Although we did perfect the eye-roll, sighing persona that would have our moms calling, Don’t you give ME that look! Sometimes the boys would miraculously find out the location of the pajama party and casually stroll by the house, completely by accident. I remember our screams of laughter and how we ran from room to room, peeking through the curtains to see just who all was out there. All it took was for the front door to be opened by the party hostess’ dad to send those boys scurrying back to their own sleep-overs, and send us into even louder fits of giggles. From what my husband tells me, the boy’s sleep-outs consisted of running around town until all hours and raiding poor unsuspecting soul’s beautiful vegetable gardens. Usually Chief Ritenour and Lieutenant Goblinger were very busy during the summer evening months, keeping track of all the little hooligans. Ritenour would patrol Derry’s streets in the police cruiser so he was pretty easy to avoid. Goblinger (and later, Snakes Anderson), would sometimes go on foot pursuit down the alleys in Derry, determined to catch one of the veggie-pilferers, just to set an example. Luckily, those boys knew all the shortcuts, the holes in the fences, and back yard hiding places. From what I hear, they did a fairly good job of avoiding all law enforcement. In high school, the pajama party evolved into more of a strategic planning session. Some of my girlfriends and I were forbidden to go to the drive-in, while other ones, the lucky ones, had no such restrictions. We would sometimes schedule said pajama parties on Mondays. This was the famous $1.00 per car night at the Hi-Way Drive In. Our dad’s would, once again, drop us off with all our gear, seemingly oblivious to the subterfuge afoot. After doing our makeup, complete with black eyeliner and a coat of Yardley Slicker lipstick, out the door we would march in our madras Bermuda, penny loafer uniforms, hair teased and flipped to perfection. Those drive-in nights were fabulous, even if sometimes we had to head home at 11:45, if our driver had a junior license. The rest of the night’s adventure still stretched out before us, and we were anxious to get to it. I remember sneaking a cigarette from one of our dad’s packs and passing it around to fits of coughing and laughing, all the while, being reprimanded by the hostess that her parents might wake up and smell smoke and think the house was on fire. We would bake cookies, call boys, and share our love-life tribulations. We felt very grown-up and worldly. We talked about all of us sharing an apartment together after we graduated and how much fun we would have. We would all move to a big city, kick the dust of crummy little Derry off our heels, lead exciting and famous lives, and stay best friends forever. Soon, the witching hour would be upon us and we would drag out the Ouija Board and ask it questions about whom we would marry and how many kids we would have. We would play ‘Light as a Feather - Stiff as a Board’ and try to lift up a ‘hypnotized’ victim using only one finger per girl. After doing each others hair and nails, and telling all the details of our innermost secrets (and taking blood oaths to never betray those secrets!), we would one by one drift off to sleep. Woe be the poor girl who fell asleep first, though. She always took the brunt of all the awful pranks we loved to pull. You remember the ones, shaving cream on the face, dipping the hand in warm water, that sort of thing. I never really got a lot of sleep on my girlfriend’s living room floors. And I was always glad to get home the next morning and jump into my own comfy bed in my own little room, and catch up on at least a couple of hours sleep. It was the same on that old wooden back porch. Those long and languid summer nights eventually came to an end, as I have learned most things do. The cricket songs would give way to the bird songs as they serenaded the awakening sun. It would peek over the Derry ridge, sending its bright rays into our slumbering eyes. Daddy would be leaving for work and tell us he would see us at supper time. We would stumble, tousle-haired and yawning into the house where mom was making breakfast. It never took us very long to fully awaken. We knew that we had heard another dragon in the forest last night...or was it Geranamo? Whatever it was, we knew there would always be dragons to slay and battles to be won. The great playground of our lives was just out the back door and down the steps - next door......in the enchanted forest that was our childhood.
Posted on: Sat, 26 Jul 2014 16:12:53 +0000
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