HOMETOWN

When categorizing good times growing up by the calendar, I settle on summer as the best season.

Sure, the other parts of the year had some positives. In winter, there were the occasional opposite delights of enough snow to cancel school, along with days mild enough to play outside without a jacket. Fall meant the county fair and football, Halloween and Thanksgiving. Even a sports-obsessed child with his head buried in box scores couldn’t fail to notice the splendor of the Sandhills in springtime, when the azaleas and dogwoods show off, relegating pine green to backup-singer status for just a bit.

For me, though, summer wins.

The longer days were a gift that seemed a thank-you from the universe for December’s dwindling daylight, when even a go-getting kid could get the blues from early sunsets that sent everyone inside. In summer, there was time to play, to read, to loll. I didn’t mind that it was rerun season on television, because I was on a porch with a transistor radio, fiddling the dial like a safecracker, trying my darndest to hear what they were saying in Nashville or New York or some other city I’d seen in the encyclopedia.

I remember a lightness in my parents, even when the air was heavy. There was one notable exception for Dad, in the years when he was a police officer in Aberdeen. The Fourth of July festivities at Aberdeen Lake meant that he had to direct traffic on U.S. 1, an assignment that caused him to loathe fireworks as much as did the county’s canines. Once he was home and out of uniform, his first beer went down quickly.

Summer meant a well-earned vacation, usually at the beach, where, for a week, my parents’ worries of mortgage payments and utility bills receded like an outgoing tide. Dad fished, but it didn’t matter too much whether a baited hook on the bottom ever attracted a spot, croaker or whiting; the pleasure was that he didn’t have to be elsewhere doing anything. My mother read magazines or closed her eyes under dime-store sunglasses and napped in the sun.

On these annual getaways, they didn’t have to check their wristwatches. Time was told by Krispy Kreme in the morning, corn dogs on the strand come noon, flounder at Hoskins Restaurant at night.

At home, Dad loved to cook out anytime, but the charcoal grill saw more action during the hot months: hamburgers, hot dogs, barbecued chicken, steak if it was on special. My father loved these evenings, even if, half the time, he was commanded to trudge back to the grill to give my mother’s entrée more time above the glowing briquets to suit her well-done preference after she had scrutinized the plated beef under the kitchen’s fluorescent fixture.

We ate plenty of vegetables year-round, but the can opener largely rested in summer. Sourced from our small garden, the overflow bounty from friends’ larger plots, or purchased from the back of someone’s pickup at an intersection, fresh produce highlighted our menus for a couple of months. I loved corn on the cob and fried okra in equal measure, but each pleasure came up short to tomato sandwiches, garnished with salt and pepper and a little mayonnaise, the red fruit ripe enough to require multiple napkins.

For a few years, before it broke, we had an ice cream maker that Dad occasionally used during peach season, but the path to a perfect homemade frozen dessert proved elusive. We were mostly a bargain carton of Neapolitan clan — the remnants of the strawberry third always the last to be consumed — but during a hot spell I had limited success slipping a package of Popsicles or Fudgsicles into our grocery cart.

We cooled off on steamy evenings with watermelon eaten in the backyard — but not too close to bedtime, per Mom’s marching orders — followed by a game of horseshoes at dusk. Ringers were rare but lightning bugs weren’t, their presence a sign that another long, lovely summer day was drawing to a close.