Will B.

As I continue my summer of recalling early memories, the traditional summer vacations come to mind. These are some of my fondest memories. Not the typical running amuck fishing, riding bikes all day, and long summer nights at friends’ houses playing games, although these were pretty amazing memories to relive another day, I am talking about road trips to distant relatives for the summer.

One of my earliest memories of such a trip was when we loaded up the truck and visited my dad’s brother for the summer. Back in my day, it was perfectly reasonable to have a truck bed full of kids traveling across town or even across the country. We kids just felt it added to the adventure. My dad’s truck bed had a cover over it so it wasn’t roughing it too bad. My two brothers and I played slug bug, license plate game, and the alphabet game as we flew down the highway in the back of the truck. The alphabet game consists of moving through the alphabet by finding each letter on different signs till we made it to ‘z.’ The other games I am sure you may have heard of.

That trip to my uncle’s house for the summer was the first time I got to meet my cousins; there were quite a few with whom I later lost contact. Arriving at a strange house late at night and meeting new relatives I had never met was a little weird at first, coupled with sleeping in a strange place that first night.

The next morning all worries were quickly dispatched as my uncle was quite funny with jokes and fed us a delicious breakfast of pancakes.

I quickly scarfed up breakfast and was anxious to meet new cousins. After some introductions, our little cousins’ crew was soon off like a pack of hyenas, laughing and being very loud as we dashed off into the woods, heading to the local pond to fish and swim for the day. Its summer sun was intoxicating in the summer, sapping energy by the minute. After an hour of swimming, our little pack was under a huge shaded oak tree nodding off to the sound of the locusts cawing in the distance and giving competition to the crow’s loud banter.

The evenings that summer were magical as well: the sound of the crickets and locusts was the soundtrack to our summer evenings. Even to this day, the nostalgia of the sounds of summer, locusts, crickets, and a breeze blowing gently through the trees will have me quickly dozing off. We stayed out late into the night catching fireflies and telling stories as the parents played cards. Every so often we could hear whooping and hollering as someone was caught cheating. These were the eternal summers of my youth that seemed to go on forever. I will always look back on them like they were a dream of my youth – where have those days gone?

This is Will B saying, it’s summer and it’s time to make memories only summer can bring.