A summer postcard to stick on the fridge

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| Wednesday, July 23, 2008 |

Summer: How do we love thee? Let us count the ways ...

1. “Summer” — the most beautiful single word in the English language.

2. A Sunday summer afternoon is the time to nap or swing in a hammock and wallow in the knowledge that there is no occasion to rise to.

3. Mid-July is when summer has begun to assert itself. July is a season unto itself.

4. Summer is for fairs, cotton candy and corn dogs. A fair is the most wholesome, the most nostalgic, the most enjoyable grandstand of Midwest life.

5. Summer is frying pan heat, and the perfect analogy of the season by Russell Baker, who said, “Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.”

6. Summer is corn, a green-blue sea in rows growing to the edge of farmstead lawns. Corn is our most precious crop … sweet corn, alongside plates of juicy, heavily salted sliced tomatoes.

7. Summer is roadsides, light lavender with clover, to the delight of bees. It would be a dull summer without clover and its friend, the milkweed.

8. Summer is for late-hatching ducklings to cross streets to reach creek or river. A big truck stops last week for eight little ones to cross under it, on River Drive near Lindsay Park in D’port.

9. Summer is a tromping madness. The Bix 7 is a mere two weeks away, and nightly, the sweaty runners are agonizing their way through the McClellan Heights hills and puffing, “This is so exhilarating.”

10. Summer is every kind of flower. We cannot have enough flowers. There is nothing more satisfying than a morning glory at a window.

11. Summer in July is the premium time to watch an outdoor drive-in movie on U.S. 61 at the edge of Maquoketa, Iowa. “Get Smart,” now playing.

12. It’s too hot to cook meat and taters. Summer is for BLTs on wheat toast.

13. Summer is the sound of baseball, hands cuffing the leather in gloves. Baseball is a burst of summer, leaving us to face autumn all alone with nothing but football.

14. Soon the cicadas will drone, rising and falling in screeches, and the twinight calls of the birds will fade.

15. Summer is the season that tries its best to make us forget winter.

16. Summer is the time of winking fireflies, which kids catch and try to keep alive in glass jars with grass in the bottom.

17. This summer, the grass is so green that no one minds cutting it. Grass keeps this planet green, with no thanks asked.

18. Summer says “Sousa” at small-town band concerts in places like Orion and Geneseo.

19. Summer says “the home place,” meaning a time to return to the house where you grew up, in any city, or at any crossroads in the country.

20. Like the old song goes … “You hold her hand and she holds yours, and that’s a very good sign, that she’s your tootsie-wootsie in the good old summer time.”

Bill Wundram can be contacted at (563) 383-2249 or bwundram@qctimes.com.