
August 1, 2024 · 0 Comments
By Constance Scrafield
Life can be busy all year round as each season brings its particular menu of distractions. Yet, for me, the summer is the freedom of warm evenings and days that invite swimming and padding about in a boat.
Summer is great for barbecues, for gathering in such a comfortable way, not to mention the whole guys – cooking – outdoors scene, which I have never quite understood. How is it that, for a person who might spend relatively little time in the kitchen, he suddenly becomes the Chef over hot coals, smoke in his eyes and the food on a rack over the flames?
Is there an ancient call within the male soul, a remembrance going back to our furthermost roots that wells up in our psyches, seeing those newly discovered fires and the thought of shoving the carcass of an animal on them for food?
For our family, summer is the days of riding horses through a tree-lined path, the quiet thud of the horse’s hooves on the earth. Here’s a field for a canter where the breeze of the day and the wind of the horse’s speed cools your face. Flying could not be better.
Could be, that canter takes us to lunch at someone’s country home, where a paddock awaits our equines with water and nice grass. The rest of us enjoy the good choices that were delivered by all of us earlier.
Or, perhaps, we’ll gather on a shaded field by a stream, our horses tethered and calm. Some of the gang have volunteered to bring the lunch and the camaraderie blossoms either way, as we enjoy the best of living in the country.
Other rides take longer trails where there is a stream to cross. Generally, horses like the water as long as they sense nothing fearful. They step along the stream, splashing, aware of every nuance underfoot and scramble with a good will up the banks onto the other side.
The best way to look at scenery, says this writer, is from a horse’s back. Riding, that unique physical connection between horse and rider, is considered pretty well psychic by most equestrians. A horse knows a great amount about its rider. Right away the person is in the saddle and, right away, an understanding takes place about the character and experience of the rider.
When the relationship is longer, maybe years longer, a tight friendship has been set, making the joy of taking that trail together…unforgettable.
Of course, there are the cottages, a great boon to so many folk, longing for the better air by a lake. Tradition tends to say the accommodations are basic as if getting away from it all includes everything.
The separation between the modern home and the cottage seems to carry a special salve to body and soul. Certainly, the childhood memories confirm that. The daily routine is pleasantly altered to one of the mornings going fishing or taking that bowl of cereal outside to sit under a tree and listen to the life around one.
It seems cottages are mainly by the water – kids learn to swim and, for a while, they can almost be other creatures, away from the youthful stresses of their peers and, with any luck nowadays, away from the internet. A shame if that shackle is not also cut. There can be more of good and use to learn by being excused from the daily – nay, minute-to-minute – contact with the entire world.
Travel, I guess, is a summer preoccupation for many. In so many truly wonderful places to visit around the world, so many are tourist-weary. This is not necessarily just the huge increase in foreign travel by so much of the world’s population – we are all foreigners in other countries, remember, but the behaviour of foreigners visiting has been on the decline.
Somehow, good manners have fallen from the protocol of travel, although I hope and like to think that Canadians are still concerned to be respectful. It has been for a very long time that we were specifically welcomed wherever we went because of our reputation for good manners.
Yet, how the major attractions are handled now speaks to the burden of numbers and the need for new measures to control them. My knowledge extends primarily to Europe and, especially to Italy, where Rome is one of the most visited cities in the world.
All antique places are filled with marvellous treasures at every turn and it is the profound obligation of the traveller to remember the many ways in which those treasures matter and are of value. So, we have no rights to them, only the exquisite privilege to witness them and to support with humility and respect that where we are, has been there for thousands of years.
Those cities, their homes and places of worship, entertainment, business, all of it deserve every notion we can have about keeping them safe.
We will do no damage and we have a wonderful time.
Ah! Whirling Summer – stay –
Let us swim, and ride and try
To eat each summer day with joy –
So sweet memories abide –