Remembering those magical summers of my youth
Summer is right around the corner, and we’ve all been dreaming of those long, lazy, sunlit evenings. My friends have been putting together a summer bucket list – it’s full of beaches, boats, grilling, and, of course, where to hide from the midday heat. All this future planning has me thinking backward to some of our favorite things to do growing up on James Island.
As kids, we were outside from sunup to sundown and into the night; these were the days when a neighborhood-wide game of Manhunt or Kick the Can was the hot (pun intended) after-dinner activity. There was a loose system in the mornings. Breakfast, pack sandwiches in the cooler, pack the boat, wait an hour for Dad/uncles to do whatever it is that Dads and uncles do when kids are full of excited energy, and Moms have already lived 3 lives, then pile into the boat and head to an island. It took a few trips to get everyone over, but once we were there, it was total freedom.
One of the first questions people ask is “but what do you DO on that little strip of sand all day?!” That’s easy to answer: everything and nothing! We went crabbing, caught shrimp, ran up the beach to see who would drift fastest back to the boats, took naps, and found beach treasures. When we got older, there was usually a competition to see how quickly Dad/uncles could throw us off the tube. They were pros.
I was a bit of a nature nerd from the start. There was a small creek that formed a lagoon in the middle of our favorite island. Some years, the entrance was blocked by sand at low tide, and critters would become trapped inside – my favorite. One day, we found a few juvenile blacktip sharks, maybe a foot long. They were completely mesmerizing. Many sharks need to keep moving to push water over their gills, and they were quickly running out of available space in the tidepools. We felt like absolute superheroes running across the beach with sharks in hand to get them back into the main creeks. I’m not sure I’ve seen such small sharks in a tidepool since that day!
Another frequent question people ask is, “How long will we be gone?” I’ve never had a good answer for that other than “until it feels like the right time to go back”. Time freedom is very underrated! Afternoon thunderstorms usually decided when the day was done. Those slow, unplanned summer days that are so characteristic of the Lowcountry helped shape a lifelong love of the natural world. Next month, we’ll explore tidepools, and in the meantime, it’s never too early to start that summer bucket list.
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