Stayin' Right Here

Sticking around in summer feels normal to me because when I was a kid nobody went anywhere. The country wasn’t set up for all this zooming about we do now. There weren’t any restaurants, for one thing. Sure, a person could grab a bite at places like Woolworth’s and Kresge’s but those places all closed at 5:00.No, if your parents really wanted to feed you kids away from home they had to hunt down one of the 'real' restaurants, usually in the downtown section with the heavy drapes and the wide leatherette seats.  You never saw restaurants along the highways because, to be honest, there weren’t any highways.And families rarely took the train.And only movie stars and moguls flew.So if your parents ever did throw caution to the winds and decide to go on the road with you they took the car and there you’d be, a family of five or seven or eight, poking along with no air conditioning, no seat belts and no for sure DVD players,  just you and your sibs all crammed in the back, while the grownups sat up front squabbling and sucking on cigarettes.No wonder people stayed home. At home it was cold sliced ham and Grape Nehi and on really hot days you could run under the sprinkler. Mornings, you’d hear the wet slicing sound of a push lawnmower; noontimes, the electric buzz of the mid-day bugs; evenings the sound of soaped-up supper dishes clinking in the sink.Yep, staying home at vacation-time had its charms all right and it still does. Think: you can get up only when you feel like getting up, throw on any old thing, then step out onto the porch, or the stoop, of the soft wet grass and look around some. The rest of the world is at work but you, you lucky dog, are idle this week. You're blooming where you were planted, just like God always hoped you would do.