1981, Springfield, Missouri: Fishing was my thing. I lived in an area where it was wooded all around. Perfect place to go exploring and camping. However I wasn't a complete outdoorsy tomboy. As pictured in the vintage photo below, I still felt the need to wear socks to protect the soles of my feet from sharp pebbles and hot sand. And look at the lovely fashion choices I made: a Budwesier towel for a cape, a bathing suit that I was in the process of quickly outgrowing, and fire engine red shorts that I was just about to slip back on. My hair was cut by my mother. She gave me crooked bangs (I hated getting my hair cut)! I had the ugliest shoes, too. This gray and orange hand-me-downs that were slightly too big for me. Behind me there are people on a raft with peddles. About an hour or so after this picture was taken, I was bitten by a water mocassin snake and nearly drowned! Lucky for me the water was shallow and I wasn't too faraway from other people.
1978, Wisconsin State Fair: There was this one ride that was sort of like a giant see saw that would go back and forth. I'm sure there's a name for it, but I can't remember it exactly. I was only 8, this was an adult ride, and seemed really scary. But the funniest thing about it was there always seemed to be a woman or girl who would get on the ride and when the thing would tilt up high enough for it to make a complete circle in the air, she'd lose the contents of her purse. I remember hearing the excited screams and seeing women lose their purses. Almost every time the ride was running! It also proved to be a dangerous ride. I no longer see those rides at fairs. I remember someone falling off one, and that was it! My babysitter used to call it the "losing your shit" ride.
1988, Almond, Wisconsin: That was a very dry summer. I remember the lakes and streams shrinking. I was hanging out with my boyfriend, Kevin, a lot. So much so that the Heavy Metal hair band music he listened to became the soundtrack of my life at that time. It was a summer where we did a lot of road trips. My favorite drink was a carbonized sugar water flavored with Peach juice and I used to find it at every gas station we stopped at. They came in these little round plastic bottles. I can't find this drink anywhere now. But, incidentally, when I am sipping a peachy drink, am near a gas station in a car sweating in the summer heat, and I hear old school metal music, I am transported to a time when I was much more innocent and arrogant. A time when I dated a really unthoughtful boyfriend who used to make me wait in the car a lot while he visited with his friends. I felt like an abandoned dog. The memory is both sad and weird. It makes me grateful for who I am now.
1999, downtown Stevens Point, Wisconsin: I temporarily lived with my brother in a terribly cramped apartment downtown on the square. Most nights were quiet enough, but often we were often besieged by hippie drunks outside pounding on drums. Now, normally I don't complain about hippie types because, most often, they aren't that hard to deal with, but this particular summer they were out in crowds with drums. Big kettle drums. Big bass drums. And bongos. The sound of the drums would vibrate in between the walls of the buildings on the square. It was one thing to deal with it during the day, quite another during the night. When it got to be 3am and the drums were still going, I would pull on my over coat and storm down to the square and scream at the hippies, demanding they stop. I couldn't sleep! And especially on week nights this was going on. And what did they do when I told them to shut up? I was accused of infringing upon their right to express themselves. "Well, what about my right to peace?" You can imagine the irony. I'm asking for peace. From hippies! Jeez.
The only other "thunder" I had to deal with were the big ass summer storms we had then. Being so close to the Wisconsin river and living in an ancient building with thin walls, the thunder would blast me out of bed. It was the most uncomfortable apartment I ever lived in. Oh, and then there were my neighbor's kids throwing fire crackers from the roof. Now that was a mess.
Here is one of the most beautiful photos I ever took of the sky right outside my bedroom window from that summer:
It's like a Sky God is about to sit down and crush downtown with heavy clouds of pink.
summer
