There are signs of summer around: bugs we like (fireflies), bugs we don\u2019t like (mosquitoes), corn tassels soon to shoot out.\u00a0 And kids on bikes.\u00a0 In town, even though there are less children than there used to be, kids on bikes are still a common sight.\u00a0 That means, of course, summer vacation!<\/p>\n
Summer vacation is the Great Liberation.\u00a0 After nine months of a type of captivity, kids are free.\u00a0 \u201cNo more school, no more books, no more teacher\u2019s dirty looks.\u201d\u00a0 I\u2019m writing here mostly about children in those years between when they need older eyes on them, and when jobs and other responsibilities begin to appear.\u00a0 About ages nine to fourteen.\u00a0 Those are the ones I see buzzing about town on their bikes.<\/p>\n
Besides on bikes, you see kids on the fishing shore where the trail runs along Sleepy Eye Lake.\u00a0 You see others shooting basketballs at hoops in front of garages.\u00a0 You can hear kids screaming at the water park from blocks away.\u00a0 (What you seldom see is kids playing catch or pick-up baseball.\u00a0 That is a sadness among my baseball friends, but a topic for another day.)<\/p>\n
Teachers talk about summer slack when children lose some skills and knowledge that those teachers worked hard to instill.\u00a0 Good parenting tries to minimize that with some time in books and maybe even a worksheet or two.\u00a0 Part of hanging around with a kid should involve an occasional mental nudge.\u00a0 \u201cSo, what kind of tree is that?\u201d\u00a0 \u201cHow would we figure the area of our deck?\u201d<\/p>\n
Summer vacation is by no means wasted time.\u00a0 We understand kids need spaces of time to fill on their own.\u00a0 Here is where imagination and creativity can take root.\u00a0 Play is critical to physical and mental growth as body and mind stretch.\u00a0 Some play should come from a child\u2019s free-wheeling brain.\u00a0 This is not to say children should be ignored.\u00a0 But if given a safe and nurturing environment, some alone-time and empty-time is valuable.<\/p>\n
Safe, mostly.\u00a0 I remember being amazed how summer took its toll on our kids at a certain age.\u00a0 By this time of July, their arms and legs were adorned with bug bites, bruises, and cuts.\u00a0 All this, on top of some sunburn.\u00a0 Summer vacation is not for the timid.<\/p>\n
A benefit of the Great Liberation of summer is the chance for brothers and sisters to be brothers and sisters rather than herded to separate classrooms.\u00a0 Science writer Jeffrey Kluger in his book, The Sibling Effect, talked about these relationships. \u00a0\u201cNobody affects us as deeply as our brothers and sisters, not parents, not children, not friends. From the time we and they are born, our siblings are our collaborators and co-conspirators. They teach us how to resolve conflicts and how not to, how to conduct friendships and when to walk away. Our siblings are the only people we know who truly qualify as partners for life.\u201d<\/p>\n
I had brother Dean who was close to my age.\u00a0 Dean was blind and spent weekdays at Faribault at what was then called the Braille and Sight Saving School.\u00a0 Most weekends he was home, but summer vacation was our big chance to play, fight, work together, create, imagine, build stuff, fight some more, explore, laugh, and sometimes hit each other.<\/p>\n
Dean being blind meant we had to find our own ways to play baseball and football.\u00a0 We never could come up with a version of basketball that worked for a blind and sighted kid.\u00a0 That wasn\u2019t a loss as long as we could be Twins and Vikings.\u00a0 We also came up with things like a kitchen table baseball game with a marble as the ball and toy farm animals to man positions.\u00a0 The animals had names and unique personalities, and we would conduct pre and post-game interviews.<\/p>\n
We seemed to break a lot of stuff, like windows.\u00a0 Perhaps that was the result of Dean\u2019s lack of vision and my lack of coordination.\u00a0 Thankfully my parents were forgiving.\u00a0 It calls to mind the story Harmon Killebrew told in his Hall of Fame speech.\u00a0 In talking about growing up, Harmon said, \u201cI\u2019ll never forget, we used to play a lot of ball out in the front yard, and my mother would say, \u2018You\u2019re tearing up the grass and digging holes in the front yard.\u2019 And my father would say, \u2018We\u2019re not raising grass here, we\u2019re raising boys.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
My other siblings were older, and that meant a steady stream of visiting nieces and nephews to the farm who became playmates and chores-helpers.\u00a0 My oldest nephew Scott spent a chunk of five summers escaping Burnsville for his grandparent\u2019s farm on the prairie.<\/p>\n
Scott became an auxiliary brother, and the family referred to Scott, Dean, and me as the Three Musketeers.\u00a0 I am sad to report that Scott passed away of a medical condition earlier this summer.\u00a0 He was sixty.\u00a0 Rest in peace Scott.\u00a0 Your spirit will always be a memory on the farm.<\/p>\n
I remember being a little jealous of my town friends because they could get together and play ball or play on the Indian trails back behind St. Mary\u2019s School.\u00a0 The trade-off for a farm kid was a grove to explore, line fences to follow, rock piles to climb, and cows and a farm dog to get to know.<\/p>\n
It may not be completely accurate, but in my memory, I didn\u2019t wear shoes during the summer, excepting for church.\u00a0 I know there was a couple one doctor\u2019s visit for tetanus shots after stepping on nails.\u00a0 The bottoms of my feet calloused over, and the occasional step on a thistle or into manure wasn\u2019t an issue.\u00a0 As parents on the same farm, we did promote shoe wearing to our children.\u00a0 Bare footedness was one of those generational divides.<\/p>\n
Even though it has been many years, but I can recall the immense and unadulterated joy that came with the last day of school.\u00a0 It\u2019s funny, but the school calendar was ingrained in me long after college.\u00a0 For seventeen years, life fell into nine and three-month patterns that were hard to shake from my conscience.\u00a0 Years after, I felt an unexplained buoyancy in early June when the sun was out past nine and sense of foreboding in late August as the days grew shorter.<\/p>\n
For many of us, summer vacations were our last large swaths of unstructured time.\u00a0 I have a few friends dipping their toes into retirement, some enjoying unstructured time for the first time in half a century.\u00a0 It turns out it\u2019s quite a thing to say, \u201cI\u2019m going to do what I want today.\u201d\u00a0 Of course, there\u2019s a little less energy than that of a twelve-year-old.<\/p>\n
So, when you see a kid biking wildly down the street this summer, be a little careful with the car.\u00a0 Know that they\u2019re doing the important work of summer vacationing.\u00a0 Maybe give them a thumb\u2019s up as they go past.<\/p>\n
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There are signs of summer around: bugs we like (fireflies), bugs we don\u2019t like (mosquitoes), corn tassels soon to shoot out.\u00a0 And kids on bikes.\u00a0 In town, even though there are less children than there used to be, kids on bikes are still a common sight.\u00a0 That means, of course, summer vacation! Summer vacation is …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[162],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-114267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weeds-by-randy-krzmarzick"],"aioseo_notices":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-22 14:40:39","action":"change-status","newStatus":"trash","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=114267"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114267\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":114271,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114267\/revisions\/114271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=114267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=114267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=114267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}