Eigo de Essay
Summer Memories August is almost over. School starts soon. Hearing the incessant buzz of cicadas outside my apartment in Tokyo, I sometimes remember the summer days of my childhood.
My grandparents lived in the real countryside surrounded by rice paddies, mountains, and a river. My family used to visit them in the summer during obon-holidays. My uncles, aunts, and cousins also got together, so the old Japanese-style house was swarmed with kids. The chorus of frogs at night from the rice paddies was our lullaby, which was too loud. My grandfather used to be in the navy and lost his job when Japan lost the war. I only knew him as a farmer ploughing fields that our ancestors had owned. Grandpa, who drank like a fish, often bragged to us kids that he had swum back to Japan when his battleship sunk. Even a real fish coudn't have come home from somewhere off the coast of the Phillipines, later I realized. He could have been a hell of a swimmer but was an amateur farmer. One summer, he grew watermelons for his visiting grandchildren. He harvested one of them and cut it in half in front of the kids who were highly expectant. Its inside wasn't red, not even pink, but was rather pale green. In the daytime, I played outside with my sister and cousins. Our favorite activity was catching wild creatures: tadpoles, frogs, dragonflies, fish, and even birds. Grandpa took us out into the rice paddies in the evening for firefly-catching. He didn't own an insect net but just swung around his broom made of bamboo branches, among which some fireflies got tangled. We put the insect cage with fireflies in a dark corner of the house and were enchanted by the small blinking lights. As a child who grew up in the center of a small city, the days in the countryside were full of wonder. However, it had its disadvantages. Our meals consisted mostly of vegetables from Grandpa's garden: cucumbers, eggplants, and tomatoes. I don't know many kids who love the repetition of cucumbers, eggplants, and tomatoes. The nearest store was eight kilometers away, and Grandpa didn't have a car. He would casually tell us that he'd buy us ice cream, and it meant an eight-kilometer hike.
If I look down from my balcony, I can see a swimming pool in which no one is swimming. It has been closed for two summers. COVID-19 pandemic has stolen many things from us. Will children today have precious summer memories to tell when they are older? Will that swimming pool be full of kids splashing water at each other next summer? I do hope so.
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