by Mik Scully

Created on: January 12, 2009

The Summer of Spanish

By anyone's standards my mother is unconventional.
Ask Edith Wellsley, she lived next door, and (although probably not the hired professional spy for Child Protective Services that my mother claimed); she was extraordinarily concerned about us, as well as being exceptionally kind. To my mind, she may have been a bit too concerned, but that's another story.

Edith witnessed a few events, that when returned to in her mind, fed her future concerns for us. Several of the incidents, as we've come to call them, had to do with our nakedness-my mother had absolutely no hang-ups about nakednessher own or oursand it never seemed to occur to her that public nakedness was a problem to others.
It was typical on a summer dayafter the five or us had been out playingfor mom to make us strip down in the front yard so she could hose us off with the garden hose.

Yikes! Coldshockingly, laughing cold, like it can be on a hot summer day. Then she'd hand us all towels, make sure we dried our feet and send us into the house to get our pajamas on. And yes, we did wear pajamas. We were not always the naked heathens the community made us out to be. Mom would then scoop up our dirty clothes and take them directly to the garage where the washer and dryer were, and start the laundry. It made perfect sense then, because for us kids it was normaland now so many years later-it still makes sense.

Another time which Edith Wellsley and the newly formed neighborhood association will point to is the time mom turned all five of us out totally naked and bolted the doors. Mom will say to this day, we had it coming, and surely we had something coming. On the day in questionanother summer dayall of us out of school we staged a mass revoltagainst the additional summer choresand that all-Spanish rule for the summer.

My mother, a free spirit in so many ways, believed strongly that children's minds should not be allowed to languish during the summerseach summer had a theme-one summer it was astronomy, another summer it was botany, and this summer it was Spanish. Just for the record, when the summer began my mother didn't speak a word of Spanish-but like everything else, she'd learn just enough the night before to stay a step ahead of us. She always managed to.

My daddy was a truck-driver-and seems like in the summer monthshe was almost never home-maybe a weekend or two over the long summer. So intervention on his part was out of the question.)

When all of us, threatened in Englishto tell

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