Opinion

Summer vacation has never been easier

Friday, May 30, 2003
Ronda Graff

The lockers are empty, the backpacks have been stored away and everything from the past nine months has been forgotten, which can mean only one thing -- summer vacation is here.

Summer vacation meant three free carefree months to frolic outside, swim everyday and avoid doing household chores. Today, carefree has been tossed out the window and been replaced with three months more heavily scheduled than most CEOs. The summer is now filled with camps, all very commendable, from church to sports, crafts to hiking.

Parents may not realize it now, but an intense summer schedule will affect a child. Growing up, my summer was barely organized but I'm still affected to this day by my summer outings.

I spent the majority of my summer away from home. I previously thought my parents just wanted me to get to know my grandparents and various other relatives I encountered during my time away from home. Now I realize -- with children of my own -- they just wanted me away from home.

A minimum of a month was spent at the grandparents house in a town fighting for smallest in the state. It did have a library, where I checked out every book in my age group; a school with a full playground, which has of course since closed; and a host of kids my age, which I spent the first three weeks and six days trying to muster up enough courage to talk to and play with.

The remaining time was spent playing checkers with my grandfather and conning him out of Big Red gum, so to this day I still fancy checkers over chess and Big Red over just about any other kind of gum.

After a spell with the grandparents, I would move onto a nearby aunt and uncle's house. This always came second on the schedule because otherwise I would have wanted to return home after one week on the road.

The aunt and uncle were wonderful people and were a exceptionally nice couple. Rather, it was the accommodations that made me a little uneasy on every visit.

They lived on a bonafied farm with everything from cows to chickens to more tractors than I could climb on. I would sit in the field and shuck peas, emptying two pods for every one that I picked. My digestive track was a little off kilter for the next two weeks, which wouldn't have been such a problem except for the next feature about the trip: No indoor plumbing.

A trip to the bathroom meant heading outside and across the yard to the outhouse. Nighttime? There was a bucket to get you through until the sun rose again.

While going to the restroom outside took about two days of adjustment, I never -- neither on the trip at hand or any of those in the years following -- could drink the milk offered at every meal. I would arrive with several packets of Kool-Aid, enough to get me through two weeks of dining.

For some reason, I just couldn't drink the milk, which for clarification, had come directly from the cow only hours if not minutes earlier. The layer of cream at the top of the milk pitcher just never looked appealing plopping onto my cereal.

You think these memories were pushed away and were soon forgotten? To this day, I must always have a minimum of 6 packets of Kool-Aid on hand, just in case, and I can't drink anything thicker than skim milk.

As I consider the wide variety of activities for my children this summer, I try to remember that this will affect them for the rest of their lives. They will be spending several weeks away from home visiting grandparents (and it's to see their grandparents, not just get them out of the house, although that is a nice perk). They will attend one or two bible camps during the summer. And they will all be brown from spending most of their days frolicking in the water.

After all, if you can't frolic during the summer, when can you frolic...and live on Kool-Aid and Big Red?

-- Ronda Graff doesn't yet allow her children to chew gum and tries to avoid giving her children all the sugar associated with Kool-Aid, but may relent...since it's summer.

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