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Jennifer McGuire is a writer, essayist and author of the memoir Nest: Letting Go from Italy, France, and Ireland.
My childhood summers at my grandmother’s house would best be described as sultry. Consider her front porch, for example. The lazy rose bush that grew up and through the chipped wrought-iron rail. Coaxed by my small hands to bend a little to the right, enjoyed in the peripheral by my Nana while she sat in her wicker chair, smoking one Du Maurier Light after another. Here we watched it rain, ate our morning biscuits, watched the neighbours live their busier lives.
Consider, too, the long, moist afternoons of chip rummy played at the dining room table. An oscillating fan making the most of the breeze from our buxom backyard willow tree.
Nana and I, plus a sprinkling of younger cousins, preferred our afternoons just so. We preferred to be free of expectations. We favoured the indoors in the sweltering midday heat. We might enjoy one or two of her soap operas, Another World and Days of Our Lives, or maybe a long nap together in her big bed. Her tasseled pink curtains closed to block the sun. Perhaps we might help ourselves to a few of her Werther’s Originals or, on a rare occasion or, if she was feeling generous, some mint-covered Oreo cookies kept cold in the fridge. These were her treats kept on her shelf that were considered invitation-only, an invisible red velvet rope drawn across her diet orange Crush, her good cheese, her pâté. I would never have considered taking from her shelf, even as an eight-year-old child spending long weeks of my summer with her. I knew my place as her guest. Her assistant. Her staff.
And best of all, her friend.
Moms, let’s stop curating picture-perfect summers for our kids
My sultry afternoons were pale yellow and sleepy, but my mornings were bright green. Dewy. Effortful. They were mostly spent outdoors with a scrawled checklist of work to do around the house for all of the kids, light child labour. Benign but necessary.
We would have time later in the day to be children. First we needed to earn our keep.
How grand I felt then. How needed. Convinced of my own self-importance, my unrivalled indispensability. I slept in my green one-piece Speedo to get started on my favourite chore immediately after breakfast, cleaning my grandparents’ above-ground pool. Solemn-faced, cool-headed, skimming leaves and bugs and debris from the cold, cold water. “Don’t swim,” Nana would call out from behind her thick historical romance on the deck. “That’s for after. Get your jobs done first.”
As if I needed reminding. I took out the trash while my brother mowed the lawn. Pulled weeds from the garden. Washed, dried, and put away the breakfast dishes, helped get started on sandwiches for lunch. Turned the laundry over. Wiped my grandfather’s toast crumbs off the counter because he never wiped his toast crumbs off the counter. Every job finished earned a neat little line through my grandmother’s printing, a satisfied clapping together of my hands. I told myself job well done. I was proud of my jobs well done.
Forget about core memories. Embrace the chaotic summer family vacation
Then and only then, after the house was turned from dusty chaos back to just regular untidy, did I jump in the pool, Nana perched on the deck to watch that I didn’t drown. She called out thrilling tidbits of local gossip as I swam lengths that would certainly earn me a place on the Olympic team. I learned the neighbour across the street was having an affair. I learned her friend Bev’s bright red hair was probably a wig. I learned my great-grandmother once stole the boyfriend of Nana’s older sister and caused a huge scandal. “They got married and had three kids, including me. My mother, the looker.”
Sometimes, the best times, she would slip in the pool to float alongside me. Here is where we were quiet, watchful children together, our fingers touching under the water. Where we contemplated the clouds or the smell of lilac bushes or wondered what we might eat for lunch. Kraft Dinner, an egg salad sandwich, a little bit of both.
If we didn’t swim or nap or play cards, we walked to the Pottawatomi River across the road. We watched people fish on the rocks, dangling our toes for the minnows to nibble. We made homemade egg nog to see if it was better in the summer. We read on the front porch for hours and hours, or rather she read as my cousins and I were tasked with shutting up for 30 minutes, which turned into the whole afternoon. All the way to twilight sometimes.
We ate bowls of jujubes gone soft in the heat. Drank big gulps of cold tap water with Kool-Aid ice cubes. So quiet, all of us were so quiet. Turned into little adults by a grandmother who invited us into her life. Who wanted us to be her friend.
Here is where I became a writer. Where I would lie on the ground and watch ants hustle around and wonder what their lives looked like back at home in their little colony. I listened to the baby robins in their nest. I smelled the tang of fresh rhubarb from our neighbour’s garden. My brain cracked open wide in those hours of deep boredom, the banal afternoons of being a child with nothing to do. Where no one entertained me but everyone was right there, living in front of me.
I remember studying Nana, the lines of her face. The delicate turn of her ankles. I gave her a life in my mind. I made her a nurse in the war. I made her an actress. I made her a Flamenco dancer and a superhero. I made her a ladyship captain, a lady pirate.
She always felt me watching her. She knew what was growing inside us all during the sleepy boredom of summer afternoons, our card games, our jobs well done. The threading together of our memories.
I don’t know who I would have become without the gentle, benign neglect of those summers. I don’t know who my own children might have become if they had been given the same gift of those same summers. I imagine them doing a long list of busy-making chores. My sons with little buckets of soapy water to wash the windows, perhaps, their faces shiny with the glow of being needed. I imagine them lying in the grass and listening to the hum of bees. I imagine them chasing fireflies at twilight. Building a blanket fort on a rainy afternoon. I imagine them just sitting. Just watching it rain. I imagine them being ignored or neglected and my chest tightens. Worried. A little horrified that they wouldn’t have something to do, to strive for. Sad to think of them not being entertained, not getting the most out of those lauded 18 summers of childhood.
And then I remember. I am me because of all that nothing. My heart is a little broken for them then, and a little wistful for the summer gift of boredom.