What I Am Looking Forward to Most About Summer Time...

With the "Spring Into Summer" Dishcloth Swap, we were asked to post about what we are looking forward to most about the summer. Besides all the knitting I really hope I will be able to do with all the bright colors and wonderful new cottons and exquisite soy I have acquired. There is something else I am looking forward to as well.

Growing up, we lived in a row home community of home after home in a neighborhood nestled way back in West Philadelphia. If you didn't know it was there, you might actually miss it. There were several one way streets off a semi-major road where you could often hear kids playing in the streets, kids on bicycles, Moms calling their kids in for dinner and the bell for the ice cream truck every summer. Out front of our little strip of a front yard, if you could actually call it that, we grew rose bushes that looked something like these. Not quite as nice as these but definitely roses and definitely pink and some even had a yellow tint as well. I remember every year as spring turned into summer watching the little buds sprout into full blown roses and being allowed to cut just one rose for the table. Those bushes thrives in the city, amazingly without much care from my Mom or me and lived on even after we moved away.

Every summer now, I stroll my own neighborhood looking for a rose bush hoping to find a pink one, but any color will do, to see the buds turn to blooms and to bring back all the memories that the flower holds for me of my childhood. We tried to grow our own again but, for some reason it just never really happened. It wasn't meant to happen again, just live on in my memory I suppose.

Of course with summer brings vacations, swimming, the beach, trips to the Pocono Mountains, a trip to Florida this year (for me not the family) but the roses are what always brings memories of my childhood and is what I look forward to most.