Summertime Blues

 

Well, I’m gonna raise a fuss, I’m gonna raise a holler,

About workin’ all summer just to try to earn a dollar,

Sometimes I wonder what I’m gonna do,

‘Cause there ain’t no cure for the summertime blues.* 

Remember those lazy summer days of our youth? No school and nothing to do but have fun for almost three months. Riding bikes all morning, retreating to the cool shade of the woods as the summer heat began to build, and playing hide and seek under the streetlights as darkness fell, until our parents called us in.

“You better get those chores done before you go off galivanting in the woods!” 

Oh, yeah. Summer chores. I remember them well from my boyhood in the 1950s and ‘60s.

My parents were children of the Great Depression. They bought a quarter acre in the suburbs south of Pittsburgh. My grandmother insisted that they put it to good use. That meant planting a big garden, putting in some fruit trees and buying some livestock to feed a growing family. The livestock, which consisted of chickens, rabbits and a duck, didn’t last. My father didn’t have the heart to do what had to be done to make dinners out of them.

On the other hand, our neighbor, who had 10 kids to feed, raised a menagerie of farm animals on their quarter acre lot. Those kids had to feed the ducks and chickens and gather their eggs. They had a nanny goat that had to be milked and a pack of “huntin’ dogs” – beagles, that had to be fed and watered every day.

My brothers and I didn’t have animals to feed, but there was always work to do in the garden. The tomato plants had to be watered virtually every day unless it rained. My father insisted they needed lots of water, delivered by watering can. A hose just wouldn’t do the job right in his opinion. My father knew that on those rare occasions when he allowed us to use the hose, my brothers and I would end up soaking each other rather than the tomato plants.

Another garden chore involved “dusting the beans.” My father punched holes in the lid of a mason jar and filled it with lime, which had to be shaken onto each plant to discourage rabbits from snacking on the leaves. Besides green beans and tomatoes, my father grew radishes, parsley, carrots, cucumbers, green peppers, and corn. One time, my mother sent me to the garden to gather some parsley. She was a little miffed when I returned with a bunch of carrot tops.

The chores didn’t stop when it came time to harvest. My parents canned more tomatoes than we ate fresh, so we’d spend hours sitting on the back porch struggling to peel the skin off the ripe, red fruit. My parents also canned green beans, so we’d be back on that porch cutting off the stems and tips and slicing the beans into bite-sized pieces.

We had two sour cherry trees; their fruit was best suited for cherry pies. After picking the ripe cherries, we would be back on that porch, cutting out the seeds while trying not to slice a finger. Destoning the cherries got a little easier and safer when my father heard that if you pulled the eraser out of a pencil and pushed it through the cherry, the pit would pop out.

There were a few chores for which my parents were willing to pay. For example, I earned a nickel for every half hour that I pushed my baby brother in the stroller. I was young and naïve enough to think I could get rich at that rate. As we got older, my father would pay us a dollar to wash his car. But he never thought to pay us to cut the grass on the large, hilly portion of our yard. On a hot, summer’s day, that was hard work!

As summer came to a close and school began, we looked forward to Saturdays.

“Those apples are getting ripe. You boys need to start picking,” my father would say.

So, my older brother and I would climb our massive tree, pick the apples and toss them down to our younger brothers to catch and put in buckets. We had to be careful because the yellow jackets liked those ripe apples as much as we did. My parents made applesauce out of most of them, canning the sauce in mason jars.

By the end of the summer, we were looking forward to returning to school. But while those chores often seemed to get in the way of our summertime fun, they also produced some great memories. And maybe, just maybe, they were the cure for our summertime blues.

 

*Eddie Cochran, Jerry Neal Capehart, 1958.