Remember When It Wasn't 800 Billion Degrees Out?

It's days like today that I wish I'd stuck with my idea to move up to Syracuse to live near my dad and stepmother. I just went for a walk around the neighborhood in the cool of the evening, but "cool" here is a relative term - the temperature at 8:52pm was 92 degrees.

So let's visit my grandparents' house outside Lockport, New York, just a mile or so down a country road from the Erie Canal, shall we? That'll be nice and cool.

My grandparents lived in an old farmhouse surrounded by orchards and cornfields - later just cornfields - with a big red barn, complete with brick silo, in the back. The barn and the fields had at one time belonged to the house, but my grandparents owned just the house and garage and a large yard and garden. The landowner did not maintain the barn, which my cousins and I played in when we were small; so over the years as we were growing up, it gradually fell down - rather a bone of contention for my grandparents, as they didn't care to have something so hazardous - and so attractive to kids - pretty much right on their property.

A little further away down the hill were a well and some one-room shacks in which seasonal farm help once lived. The shacks still contained decaying furnishings, appliances, bedding, and a few personal items and food containers. Another one of the farm outbuildings contained a rusting old washing machine, the kind with the hand-cranked wringer on the top.

The house had a musty-smelling attic full of strange and ancient treasures, with steep, dusty steps; and a cool cellar complete with cistern. My grandfather processed honey in the cellar from the beehives he kept behind the barn, and sold the honey to passerby who saw the small sign out front and came up to the front door. There were apple trees between the house and the barn, and the apples harvested in the fall kept fresh in the cellar all winter. In summer, there was ear after ear after ear after ear of sweet, freshly-harvested corn from the garden; so much of it that tempers began to run a little short at the dinner table when Grandma passed the platter for the seventeenth time. Please. Please. No more corn.

I didn't much care for winter, which was rather on the chilly side. I didn't enjoy putting on long underwear and pants and shirts and a sweater and a snowsuit and two pairs of socks and sneakers and rubber boots and a scarf and a hat and a hood and gloves and my aunt's mittens, just to venture outside for three minutes, then come back inside because I couldn't feel my nose. Snow, I thought as a child, was lovely to look at, but I never wanted to play in it very long. It always got in and drenched the underlayers. Probably I just wasn't adequately sealed.

Still there was nothing else quite like waking up late at night on Christmas Eve to find the moon shining blue-white on a blanket of freshly fallen snow, and trying unsuccessfully to wake up my cousin Gretchen to share the moment (damn, that girl could sleep). And, drenched skivvies or no, running down the hill into chest-high snowdrifts until you collapsed because your legs didn't work in that much snow was insanely fun. In the summer you could jump from hay bales in the hayloft and play castle in the barn (until it fell into too much disrepair), climb the enormous weeping birch tree out front, practice archery, have doll tea parties, defoliate Grandma's rose bushes to scatter the petals, and pluck her petunias and turn them upside down to make gorgeously-gowned flower dolls, which would hold glorious dances on the back patio. Grandma never seemed to mind this. Maybe she figured it was just karmic punishment for all the corn she foisted off on us.

I miss those times. And I miss Daddy and Joyce. Hey, can I come spend the rest of the summer with you guys? I promise won't impose for too long. Just till October or so.