Oh Julio...

I was supposed to be born somewhere between June 30th and July 4th, but back in the early 80's in the middle of nowhere, they just saw fit to let me hang out for another 3 weeks. My first experience with the month of July occured before I was even born. My mom went down to the yearly Wauseon Homecoming and walked around to try to entice me to come out. "This is your cousin, and this is your great-uncle, and this is your other cousin, and..." For those readers not from the more hickish regions of the country, Homecomings are big deals. The highlights of the Wauseon Homecoming were a large bingo tent, a feris wheel, and a parade primarially featuring a gigantic model of a cow named "Sterlina". My family continued to attend even after we became "city" people.

It sounds sad, but I would consider flying from Oregon to Wauseon just to attend the Homecoming. I'm intrinsically drawn to it, in all its farm-town glory. The Homecoming means that summer has officially begun.

I know that Memorial Day is supposed to be the official start of summer, but its never meant that to me. Memorial Day used to mean that the water up at my grandparent's little lakefront cottage had warmed up to the extent that my Dad would risk going in to set up the dock. In my mind, summer and water are forever linked. My family always spent the 4th "up at the lake". There, we would celebrate perhaps my family's greatest tradition: the Sparklerfest. My grandma would go to the IGA and buy, like, 36 boxes of sparklers. She would put all of them in a rusty old Maxwell House coffee tin, and we would take them out and light them. I usually did dances and after I learned cursive, I wrote my name in cursive in the air. The rules became a little more strict, however, after my brother accidentally set my butt on fire one year. I was wearing these new white-and-pink flannel pyjamas my mom had just made for me. As it turns out, flannel is highly flammable and a lot of it comes now with "do not use for children's clothing" stamped on the inside of the bolt. Turns out there is a good reason for that.

The other beautiful thing about this time of year? Anything that ends in "-berry" is ready to eat. My aunt used to grow raspberries when I was little, and I would eat them off my fingertips by the bushel. Then one year, the raspberries caught the berry version of dengue fever and died. I was devestated. We had to resort to buying them in the grocery store at triple the rate of inflation like the rest of the general population.

One day, I was floating on my back in the lake, looking up at the clouds. I had just been to bible school, and they taught us that we should ask God for whatever we desire. I desired raspberries. All of a sudden, I noticed something small and dark floating by. Sweet manna from heaven...blackberries! They were floating past me with the current. I started swimming after them and swallowing them. When my parents realized what I was doing, I got spanked for eating dirty things out of the lake. If I had been a little quicker on my feet back then, I should have told my parents that they were operating contrary to the will of God. But I think I was already hard enough to parent as it was.

Last night, I found the most real-deal raspberries I've ever seen at a grocery store. I ate some for breakfast. They were just as tasty as I remember. Now, if only the temperature would go above 70 degrees and it would stop raining...