Summer on Sandy Street.

 

 When I was a kid we lived in a row house in Norristown. On the front steps is where I would sit and play Jacks, wait for the ice cream man, play with my neighborhood friends, and read my books. We would scrub those steps with soap and water and a brush,  and sweep the sidewalk at least weekly in the summertime, that was just the way things were done back then. At night the neighbors would sit outside on the steps or folding chairs after supper - grown-ups talking,  kids playing tag or catching lightning bugs in a jar. It was one of the ways we kept cool when the temperatures got hot.

     Of course there was no air conditioning back then, just fans in the front windows blowing air in and an exhaust fan in the kitchen blowing out. With a house full of people and no such thing as a microwave or spare money for take-out food, meals had to be cooked daily, yet somehow we kept comfortable. Hard to remember what that was like. The bedrooms had fans as well, but the third floor still got too hot for sleeping sometimes and when that happened, we slept on the couch or the living room floor or  sometimes outback on the porch.

     Behind the house our back porch was usually cooler than out front, or  indoors since it was nearly always shaded. Extending over the back yard from the porch were the clothes lines on pulleys. Wet clean clothes were carried up from the washing machine in the cellar and hung on the line in the summer, unlike the winter months when  they would be hung on ropes in the basement. Outdoors they dried more quickly and smelled like fresh air.  There was a metal glider on the porch and a couple of metal rocking chairs and small tables. It was a quiet place to sit and just relax or read or talk. I remember sitting with Grandmom and snapping the ends off of string beans to get ready for cooking, or her teaching me how to sew. She often sat and crocheted or knitted out there, even at night which amazed me because she had been doing those things so long it didn't require sight - it was almost like breathing to her.

     From the porch there were about ten steps to go down to the backyard with a lawn so small that you could mow it with a manual mower in about 10 minutes. There were flower beds on either side, with pansies, marigolds, azaleas, snapdragons, bleeding hearts and a lot of rose bushes. In the summertime Mom or Aunt Marie would set up the wading pool and somehow we would  probably fit about six to eight  kids in that little 5 by 8 by 1 foot high swimming pool.  Grandmom would sit at the end of the pool on her chair and stick her feet in the water. Somehow we also had room for a bench type swing in that little yard and Grandmom would sit out there in the in the shade and keep an eye on us kids.
   

       But the best part of Summer on Sandy Street was probably the garden. Out the back gate of the yard, across the little alleyway and down a few more steps and it was like  you were out on the farm. It wasn't very big, maybe fifty by fifteen feet but there was fresh basil growing on the side as you walked down the steps,  then  grape vines, some pepper plants but mostly what I remember was the tomatoes. There was nothing like picking them fresh off the vine still warm from the sun, nothing tastes better.   So many tomatoes - tomato salad, tomato and mayo sandwiches, homemade tomato sauce.  One incident that I was not present for but I have heard about was the tomato fight between a few of my cousins. There were dozens of tomatoes ripening on the tables on the back porch when Mickey, Dino, Gina and Anna started throwing them at each other. Needless to say, Grandmom was not pleased and started yelling in Italian, so we don't know exactly what she said, but they did not do that again, and they never forgot that day.

      The peppers and tomato plants  needed to be bought and planted every year, but the fig tree was just always there in the middle of the garden.  Every summer it grew bigger and bigger. There was nothing sweeter than the taste of fresh picked figs right off the tree. Year after year that tree produced fruit. For a while when it was smaller, Mom or someone would wrap it in blankets and cover it with a basket to keep it from freezing in the winter, but in time it became too large to contain and probably had deep enough roots to keep it alive. There were enough figs most summers to provide the whole family with fresh figs  for the whole summer and splits were taken from the tree and given away to allow the rest of the family to grow their own trees.

    The house was sold a few years ago and Mom and my sister Mary took a split from the fig tree to plant in her back yard, It has taken years of care and diligence to protect it from deer and landscapers, but that little tree still persists and may finally produce fruit this season. Even if we never get to taste those home grown figs again, as long as we tell the stories, we will have lots of sweet memories.