There are certain things that simply belong to summer.
Fresh tomatoes still warm from the garden.
Homemade ice cream.
The happy sounds of children splashing in the water.
The crack of a bat at a baseball game.
Sweet tea and watermelon on a hot afternoon.
The smell of freshly cut hay.
Honeysuckle drifting on the evening breeze.
Backyard barbecues.
The distant hum of a lawn mower somewhere down the road.
And, if you ask me . . . .
Butterflies and fireflies.
The other day I came across a simple thought that stayed with me much longer than I expected.
It wasn’t complicated. In fact, it centered around one of the smallest marks in our written language — a tiny little dash.
You know the one. The little dash between the dates.
Every life can eventually be described by two dates. One marks the day we entered the world. The other, someday, marks the day our earthly story is complete.
Between those two dates is a simple little dash.
But when one thinks about it, that tiny dash mark somehow has to represent an entire lifetime.
Not just the years . . . . the life. The living in between the dates.
And that got me thinking.
Perhaps the most important part isn’t the dates at all.
Perhaps it has always been the life between them.
Thanks for stopping by to visit. I was thinking about something the other day . . . .
When I was about six or seven years old, our next-door neighbors invited me to spend the weekend with them on a little farm they owned near Florida, Missouri.
It wasn’t a working farm in the sense I imagined farms to be. Someone else did the farming, and they simply shared the harvest. And by city-boy standards, it was primitive, like a trip back to the wild west of my imagination.
A well for water and no indoor plumbing. There was a chamber pot for doing necessary overnight business behind a pulled back curtain in what used to be a closet because outside there could be roaming bobcats, coyotes, and foxes. They didn’t mention bears and wolves, but my imagination soon caught up to include them, too.
But for me, though, and how it all turned out, it all might as well have been Yellowstone National Park.
I had no idea one ordinary summer Saturday was about to introduce me to a whole new world and life
Every summer, there comes a day when I notice the grasshoppers again, with their buzzing and whirring in the tall grasses and weeds along the fence lines. Together with the cicadas droning in the afternoons, it has all been the sounds of summer for me.
One afternoon not long ago, I was walking along the edge of a nearby field when something sprang out of the tall grass ahead of me. It landed on a weathered fencepost just a few feet away and sat perfectly still. It was a grasshopper. Mottled olive-green in color, perched motionless on the grey wood.
Most of us don’t give grasshoppers much consideration. They hop out of the way, disappear into the weeds, and go about whatever it is grasshoppers spend their summer afternoons doing. We notice them for a second or two, then we continue along on our way.
This time, for reasons I can’t quite explain, I didn’t.
I stopped.
Welcome back to the Front Porch.
Please pull up a chair for a few minutes and make yourself comfortable. Today I’d like to make a confession — one that may permanently damage my reputation as an honest fellow.
I’ve been lying to perfectly nice people for years.
Professionally.
Now before anyone becomes too alarmed, I’m talking about the respectable, old-fashioned kind of lies. The harmless sort that begin with, “Once upon a time . . . . “ and somehow end with everybody smiling.
Mark Twain is often credited with saying that if you want to become a good fiction writer, you must first become proficient at the art of lying. Whether he actually said those exact words or not, I’ve never been entirely sure. But I’ve always had a difficult time believing he’d object to the sentiment, and cannot argue with it myself.
The longer I’ve been writing, the more I think there may be more than a little truth hiding inside that mischievous observation.
After all, I’ve spent years convincing otherwise sensible people that a talking bear in the Ozarks backwoods wears overalls, a bloodhound interviews a talking mule, a goat develops an unhealthy appetite for hats, and somewhere in a fictional place called Honey Hill Country there are folks who seem just a little more interesting than anyone has a right to be.
And the surprising part?
People keep believing every word.
The curious part isn’t that writers tell these respectable lies.
It’s why perfectly sensible people keep smiling . . . . and asking for another one.
And well . . . . that’s where the real story begins.
Welcome back to the Front Porch. I’m glad you could stop by for a few minutes.
Lately I’ve found myself thinking about simple things.
Trees.
Wildflowers.
Birds.
Butterflies.
Forests.
Streams.
The ordinary things that make a place feel alive.
Perhaps it comes from spending so much time wandering through Honey Hill Country. Or perhaps it simply comes with age. Either way, I found myself sitting with a thought the other day.
Not a complicated thought.
Just a hopeful one.
The Front Porch by James Milson 