Summertime and the Memories are Good

What did you love best about summer when you were a kid?

This year when The Innocent released I had a fun giveaway contest and invited readers to share some summer stories with me. I’m always blessed when I get to read these firsthand experiences from you all.

Toni was like me in that she enjoyed playing with her cousins. I wasn’t like her in that I didn’t have twenty-eight cousins nearby. I had six cousins and two of those lived in a different state so we didn’t see them very often. We did see a couple of our cousins nearly every week and we had loads of fun. Especially in the summertime. We played ball. We swam in the pond. We climbed trees. We explored the woods. We had a great time. This is me sort of climbing a tree.

Toni’s Summer Memory

Here’s what Toni said about playing with her cousins.

A summer memory? I have so many. I grew up surrounded by my cousins. We had 28 of us within a three mile radius. And there was always one or more up for something. As always, the parents counted on the older ones to keep an eye on us younger ones, although I sometimes think that we younger ones were the ones watching the older ones. Summer was a time to stick our feet in a cold bucket of water (no pools around us) to cool off at night. Late nights talking in the back yard to keep cool (no air conditioners on at our house). It was a summer filled with laughter, love and innocence and memories to last a lifetime.

The very best kind of summers for kids, Toni. Thanks for sharing about yours. And they might be the kind of summers that many of the rest of you might remember. Maxie shared her fun summers too with the same echoes of fun we heard in Toni’s story.

Maxie’s Summer Memories

Here’s what Maxie remembered.

I loved summertime when I was growing up. We lived in the country and ran around barefoot, making up games, jump roping, playing with an older brother and we loved climbing a huge tree by a fence at our grandparents. It had big spread out easy to climb limbs. We could play there for hours. We also loved playing in the rain and  catching the many baby frogs that were everywhere at that time. We had a large family so always seemed to have something to do, like  family games. I loved how we went to town in the wagon with the folks on the weekends and could run all over the town without parents and sometimes with cousins. Also schoolmates. Also visit lots of  relatives. We went places by wagon and horses. After night we would chase lightning bugs. I remember fishing for crawfish in a little pond behind our house. Momma would get sticks and tie strings to them, then put bits of bacon fat on and we’d catch them while she watched. I hated to pick them up so would get my little brother to put them in the bucket. LOL Loved  those days. Such more peaceful days than now. And more family togetherness. More fun at school too when we had recesses and played games like red rover , etc.

Loved hearing about your summertime fun, Maxie.

Contest to Win a Book Open a Few More Days

The deadline for entering my book giveaway is Saturday, August 1, 2015. So leave a comment to pitch your name in my giveaway hat. Just tell me which of Toni’s or Maxie’s summertime fun you used to do or that you wished you had a chance to do when you were a kid. I’ll pick three winners who will get their choice of one of my books. You must be eighteen to enter and please leave a way to contact you in case you are one of the winners.

Thanks so much for stopping by.