Summer

 

by Madi Pane

 

To me summer is all about family, Christmas and of course everything revolves around when the cricket is on. Over December and January we always go down to our beach house in Rye and my older cousins come up and stay with us for a while.

Every summer brings in a bucket full of new memories for my family. There was the year that we built our pizza oven, the year my sister and I managed to teach all of the adults how to pull themselves out of the pool upside down, the year it rained and the year we went to Malaysia. My favourite summer was three years ago.

It was a boiling hot summer! Dad, who seemed to like feeling in charge, made the rule that we all had to sit down for an hour each day to watch an episode from the series ‘Kung Fu.’ To give you an idea of what we were being put through, it was 15 hours of ‘come to me dear grasshopper and when you are able to walk over rice paper you will be a master of Kung Fu’. We were all dripping with sweat because of the lack of conditioning and we could not wait for the next Test match to finally start, so that Dad would have something better to do then torture us.

In the morning we would wake up and go to the beach just down the road. We somehow managed to entertain ourselves for hours, with nothing but the sand, the sea and whoever else was at the beach. My sister and I created the anchor game; the rules were to pull up the metal chain of a boat parked near the shore, until you reached the anchor and then it was a competition of who was strong enough to reach it. When we were finally pulled away from the water and taken home, Mum would barely to keep us out of the pool long enough to feed us lunch and reapply our sunscreen.

Mum and Aunty Anne could always be found reading a book or magazine in the front sunroom of the house or in the kitchen trying to cook enough food to feed all of us after a busy day of swimming, only hopping in the pool, when they could absolutely no longer stand the heat of the sun.

My Dad and my Uncle Mick spent their time in front of the footy watching the cricket and sometimes reading their books by the pool; this particular summer Mick was not in the best of moods after accidently throwing his book in the pool, as he was shaking out his towel.

 

Comments

  1. Great summer memories. I hope this summer is a hot one too, grasshopper

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