by Barbara Stanley

Created on: September 07, 2009

I grew up in the South; South Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana. While my father chased the elusive dream, my brothers, sister, and I spent our time adjusting to a new city or new state. The moves were usually made in mid-summer to give us kids time to settle in before school started for another year. As summer would come to an end, a new adventure would begin for me, leaving me torn between the need to hang on to the miserably hot and humid deep South summers and the desire for any relief that autumn might bring.

In my early childhood, I formed the memories of the joy of summer's end during my family's extended visits with my grandmother and great-grandmother. It was with my own siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles that I spent those long days with daylight that lingered into the night. Oh what joy to run and hide in the fields of wildflowers and sweet clover beside my grandmother's house. Her China-berry trees that grew advantageously next to the highway was the perfect place from which to hide as we pelted passing cars with the reddish-purple berries that left the cars, our clothes, and hands stained by the indelible ink from the juice. Of course, we were eventually found out and punished, leaving us no choice but to form teams in opposing trees to make war with each other.

If my family spent the visit home staying with my mother's granny, my relatives would visit with us there. As the adults gathered on the front porch with tall glasses of iced tea or lip-puckering lemonade, we children would entertain ourselves with made-up games over which we argued due to changing rules that always favored the inventor's team. There would be those moments when a less than warm breeze would blow through granny Ruth's wisteria vines, filling the air with the heavenly fragrance that still takes me back to her country yard and the sound of children's laughter. There is no doubt that we had fun or the fact that our fun was free.

My father never found that perfect place to live that would allow his business to grow, earning him enough money to stay put. My mother struggled to make clothes for her five children and find bargain shoes we could wear to school. The end of summer must have been a nightmare for my mother. Looking back, I see her sorting and packing at the beginning of every summer, only to unpack and try to put our family back in place before summer's end. She spent her summer nights at her sewing machine while her family slept.

Of course, in the deep

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