Good Morning.
There was no air-conditioning when I was growing up, a situation that has made me all the more grateful for it during my adulthood. I don't like the heat, at least not the stuff over eighty degrees. When it's cold you can wear layers of clothing and wrap yourself up in a blanket if necessary, but when it's hot, there's only so much you can do, short of standing in a cold shower several times a day and running up the water bill.
I wasn't allowed to go to public swimming pools because there was a polio epidemic until the vaccine was discovered. I vaguely recall an ugly canvas wading pool that was filled with a hose but running through the sprinkler was better. Every room in the house had an electric fan, a cooling method that was supplemented by a piece of mail or other sturdy paper item waved in front of the face. The heavy bedspreads, velvet drapes, and winter clothes were dispatched to mothballs in the attic and replaced with cotton, a fabric that was supposed to breathe, whatever that meant. The Good Humor truck came around every night and peddled ice cream on a stick in several flavors. Toasted Almond was the best and cost eleven cents.
One of my favorite weekend destinations was Crescent Beach on the Connecticut shore. The people across the street in town had a Victorian, six-bedroom house that was always packed with guests. The house was situated on a bluff that overlooked a bay of the Atlantic, and there was a huge wraparound porch with wicker furniture and a table where I learned how to play bridge at the age of nine. Corn was shucked on the back porch, a few steps from an old wooden windmill and a bathhouse for changing in or out of a swim suit. A yacht club was down at the beach but there weren't any yachts. It was a place for hanging out with a grinder, elsewhere called a hero or sub, and a milkshake. Back at the house, Aunt Happy, short for Harriet, made pancakes for breakfast but hers were not circular in shape. She created free-form creatures called schmoos and always the initials of the children at her table.
The rest of my favorite places were in the Massachusetts Berkshires. The people up the street in town had a second house that had been built during the nineteenth century by the Shakers who insisted on having separate entrances for men and women because they were celibate, all of them. They figured they'd convert people to spread themselves and their ideas around, but they died out pretty quickly. The house, reached by a dirt road and highlighted with a crudely built fence, was located on a hill above the hamlet of Tyringham that boasted a small library and a structure called The Gingerbread House because it had a wavy roof and crisscross paned windows. It became an art museum. The Congregational church had the requisite white pillars and the cemetery out back had grave markers dating to the 1600s. I like cemeteries, especially old ones. They're historical and quiet.
Not far away was Lake Garfield lined with cottages that tended to be small and quaint. We rented a place for two summers, and I learned how to swim and put a worm on a hook because we went fishing nearly every day. We bought slabs of sharp, white cheddar at a nearby general store and ate chunks of it without crackers, the cheese not the store. In 1983 I rented a cottage at the lake and hauled my family across the country. We swam and canoed and grilled hamburgers and swordfish on the deck and played tennis on an old concrete court. We also went to a magic place called Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony and my spiritual mecca from the time I could walk.
Saturday morning rehearsals at Tanglewood were held in a large, open-air shed and the tickets were cheap. For the Saturday evening or Sunday afternoon concert you could pay big bucks to sit there again or you could find a spot on the huge expanse of lawn outside. The fancy people set up tables with candleabras and dined on lobster salad and lemon mousse, but the rest of us sat on blankets with sandwiches and brownies. Potato chips and other noisy foods were not appreciated, and neither were squirmy small children. I was first taken to Tanglewood when I was three or four and told I had to be quiet and sit still with my box of dried apricots. Fortunately I liked classical music at a very early age and apparently lasted through the concerts without incident.
Best regards,
Elisabeth
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