One of the local television stations has been running a commercial showing the brilliant faces of several ages of children doing what children do: run, play, somersault, laugh uproariously. The photography is simple. The scenes are simple….backyards, playgrounds, swimming pools. At the end there are is the simple message: ‘Summer…84 days to be a kid again.’

I’ve really enjoyed this commercial. I’ve enjoyed the sheer joy on the children’s faces, the wild abandon of their play, the sense of freedom it exhibits. 84 days to be a kid again. I thought of these words last night as I watched all the children at our National Night Out block party. I know all of these children individually and see them in the neighborhood all the time. But somehow when they all were in one place at the same time, they became a force. A force of fun, of freedom, of memory. Ice cream dotted their sweaty faces, most were tired beyond words, but their wise parents allowed them to play and play until they were finally carried home, exhausted, filthy, ecstatic. Isn’t it what we all wanted to do?

This morning as I went for an early morning walk there was no sign of their frenetic bodies running and jumping. The chairs and tables, ice cream sticks and soda cans had been cleaned up. The only visible sign of the last night’s activities were the sidewalk chalk words: Happy Summer! The hot pink and bright blue letters brought a smile to my face and a spring to my step.

Happy Summer, indeed. I don’t know where we are in those 84 days. But I do know that as I walked home from the block party last night, the dark and humid air hung heavy with the faint scent not of summer, but of fall. Last Sunday evening while having a lovely outdoor meal with friends in their backyard surrounded by  purple cone flowers and pink phlox, a yellow leaf fell slowly from the tree overhead into my salad. So it seems to me each of us have the responsibility to not let the summer pass us by without remembering…….what it was like to be a kid. The school bell will ring before we know it.

"On a summer morning I sat down on a hillside
to think about God- a
worthy pastime.
Near me, I saw a single cricket;
it was moving the
grains of the hillside this way and that way.
How great was its
energy, how humble its effort.
Let us hope it will always be like this,
each of us going on in our inexplicable ways
building the universe."
~Mary Oliver