I remember being a child growing up on a small farm in Vermont. I attended a one room school with separate outhouses for boys and girls and a pail of water brought from the river to drink from if we were thirsty! No worries about bacteria back then. We had a lot of sick days we could use.

We went on a school picnic to mark the ending of the year. We had one bus (a van with wooden benches along the sides and one in the center) and the parents would fill cars with baskets and kids. We'd go to the local lake and have fun swimming and playing baseball or horseshoes. I remember one year I got a bad sunburn and was quite miserable for days, thanks to being a redhead!

But, oh! When school was out for summer the fun began. My brother and I had the farm's acreage to investigate and make up games to play. There were always cowboys protecting the land from rustlers. Skip would be Roy Rodgers and I would be Annie Oakley, Little Miss Sure Shot. We fought off many bad guys during the summer. Sometimes we would be Indians fighting the cowboys. I would be Princess Laughing Water and Skip would be Chief Bear Killer. We did have bears in our woods and the river water always did seem to laugh at us.

We also had names for two giant rocks that were right next to each other. Each boulder was the size of a small house, and we were the king and queen of the land. Many hours were spent talking to each other and eating berries we had picked. Food fit for royalty!

Vermont summers are short, and it takes forever to warm up enough to go swimming in the river that ran through our land. The temperature of the water never seemed to get over 60 degrees, but when the sun beat down, we would jump in and stay until our teeth chattered. There were "skitter spiders" that we avoided (Dark Fishing Spiders) and just splashed them away from us.

But as I learned to read even before I went to school, my sharpest memory is that of reading a book perched high in our ancient apple tree. I loved to grab a well-read book and a saltshaker and climb onto the welcoming branches. The taste of a not-quite-ripe MacIntosh apple sprinkled with salt makes my mouth water. Green apples never gave me a tummy ache as my Gram warned, but maybe that's because I was a stubborn little girl and loved to prove grown-ups wrong.

Many wonderful trees offered me the opportunity to climb way up until I could make the tree sway with my weight. I remember once when my brother ran down to the house to tell Gram that I was too high in the tree. I was made to come halfway down which was not nearly as much fun. Skip's tree was a stunted pine that welcomed us with pitch that took strong soap to get our hands clean.

Haying was great fun as my gram and auntie would hitch the two work horses to the wagon and Skip and I would keep climbing up on the mound of growing hay. We were again royals in a parade as we rode back home and into the barn. Sliding off into a hay mound was such fun and never happened often enough.

I remember one year, when the August "dog days" were so hot that no one wanted to do much of anything. I imagine it must have been in the 90's with high humidity. I wished very hard that it would cool off. Like magic September came with the cool days and I was sorry I had wished away the summer for now I had to go back to school. I never wished away summer days ever again.