Slumping

I have come to realize I'm in a mid-summer slump. With two quiet weeks in a row, I find I'm having trouble coming up with things I need or want to do. We had our fun week of house-sitting and exploring KC. Then we had several weeks in a row with appointments and errands that took up a lot of our time. But it's almost a month until our trip to Oregon, much too early to start making packing lists and so forth. So I'm kicking back in the a/c, watching reruns on TV. Except for the a/c part, it's almost like morphing back to summers on the farm.

By this point in summer during elementary school, Vacation Bible School would be a distant memory and our annual week in Jefferson City would be in the rearview mirror. The annual church picnic in the park would already be over with, and it was still several weeks before the annual family reunion. It was hot, the days were long..........and there was nothing to do. The exhilaration of being free for the summer had dissipated somewhere around the Fourth of July. And I was bored.

I was tired of doing my summer chores, I was tired of the heat causing the TV to not work well, and even the joy of being considered old enough to mow the yard was wearing thin. I still enjoy watching gardens grow and develop in the spring, even as I did as a kid. But by mid July the fascination turned to dust and sweat as the garden needed to be checked and vegetables picked on a daily basis. And that, in turned, morphed into snapping beans and husking corn. It was sometimes fun to help count the "pop" of jar lids after home-canned vegetables had come out of the pressure canner. Otherwise, it was a hot job when it was 90+ degrees outside.

Playing and exploring in the timber lost its appeal - not only because it was hot and prime time for snakes to be out, but I inevitably managed to get near poison ivy. The only thing worse than the heat of mid summer was having an itchy rash during that heat. Time would just crawl by until the second week of August, when it was finally time to get ready for a new school year.

As I got older, the mid-summer slump didn't last as long. By the time I got into high school, I was sewing the majority of my school clothes. That was a job that could begin in mid July - flipping through the pattern books to find versatile patterns in newer styles, cruising the aisles in the fabric section at JCPenney, and buying fabric and sewing supplies.

We had an old cabinet-style treadle machine - in fact, Mom still has it in her apartment, though I don't think it gets much use. During the late summers of my high school years, I peddled a lot of miles on that machine! Following in the footsteps of the aunt who had made a lot of my clothes during my elementary years, I tried to use different trims to switch up the pattern.......even though we all did the same thing, we all tried to not look like we had cookie-cutter clothes all made from the same pattern. It was just fiscally responsible to use the patterns multiple times.

Being a child of the 60's, I loved the fashion changes that came in the late 60's - the bright colors, combining colors that formerly was not supposed to be used together, radically different styles. Sadly, I wasn't built for most of those styles - but I loved them nevertheless. As hemlines began to rise, so did clothing discussions at our house. Mom finally put her foot down, and I was told in no uncertain terms that I was to cut the fabric for my dresses exactly off the pattern and put a narrow hem.

Now, I've not exactly been known for handling ultimatums well. In fact, the more firm the ultimatum.....the stronger my determination to figure out how to get around it. I've always figured it was my Irish genes kicking in. So after Mom gave me the ultimatum about cutting my dresses exactly by the pattern, I decided I would do just that. After I'd whacked off the bottom of the pattern so it was the length I wanted. It wasn't too difficult - all I had to do was make sure Mom was out of the house the first time I used the pattern.

I'm sure it didn't take Mom long to figure out what I was doing. But I don't think she ever brought the subject up again. Maybe she just figured I'd eventually get past wearing short dresses. At any rate, sewing my own wardrobe for school was a good way to beat that mid-summer slump.