‘Remember those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer? I do!’

“Oh, those lazy, hazy days of summer.” This is an old song, a hit that was around, when we were all closer to the ground.

Now summer has passed us by, safe in our air-conditioning. Time stands still for none of us. When we were young, we were the generations before plastic and above-ground pools with rubber liners. The lazy, hazy days of our childhood summers were spent splashing in a canvas wading pool.

My father would construct this canvas contraption, with metal struts, and my parents would fill it with at the garden hose. We splashed and played in the dappled sunlight or our garden, somewhere in suburbia. The water took on the aroma of the sodden canvas. My sisters and I used to wear the togs popular in those days, swimmers with frilly skirts, in pale pastel shades.

We invited two of the neighbouring girls over for a paddle, Caroline* and Mary*. In between playing in the canvas wading pool, we would pluck warm, sun-ripened apricots or nectarines from the fruit trees in the backyard.

There was a little traditional milk bar at the corner of our hot, gravel street. The gaggle of young girls were ‘allowed’ to walk there unescorted by adults and buy ice blocks in square cones, for tuppence (about two cents) each. Or we would purchase vanilla ice-creams, as ice-cream was considered good for us, the ‘health food of a nation’!

Back home, the weatherboard house had only one electric fan. It was hot, hot, hot. After mum tipped away the water from the wading pool, we passed some summer dusks running through the sprinklers.

We did not realise it, but later research showed we were living in a periodic drought. All that water wasting! Soon, the limitations of water restrictions were enforced. Sprinklers and hoses were banned. The ‘oldies’ we current wrinklies labelled our parents, began conserving precious water, to hand water plants in the garden with buckets.

Why did they grow ferns in a hot, arid summer in the middle of a scorching drought? They just did, okay! Anyway, time stood still for none of us. When developers bought the large sprawling weatherboards, they ripped up all those gardens, built boxes of units, such as where I dwell. They planted pine bark instead of oxygen. But even in a unit, we can grow flowers, to bloom, as the seasons pass.

A childhood of lazy, hazy summers. Now here we all are, as the seasons turn again. Our youth and those summers, all gone now, total bummer!

*Not their real names.

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