scintilla #3- that song

 

Prompt #3 for The Scintilla Project: Talk about a memory triggered by a particular song.

I have a whole head crammed full of memories that are triggered by several decades worth of songs, so I kept hoping I could write about a memory involving a really cool song. An impressive song. One that would immediately label me as being, well, cool and impressive with my oh-so-progressive musical taste. But I just keep coming back to this one song on one afternoon when I was 11 or 12. Summer Breeze, by Seals and Crofts. Which is certainly not a bad song; it’s a very sweet song that got lots and lots of airplay. It’s just not exactly groundbreaking. I looked it up to see when it came out, and one music critic called it “one of those relentlessly appealing 1970s harmony-rock anthems”, which sounds about right. (I also discovered that the Crofts half of Seals and Crofts and the England Dan half of England Dan and John Ford Coley are brothers. Thank you for the interesting trivia, Wikapedia!)

This memory that’s triggered by Summer Breeze is very simple and very very vivid. I’m in my grandfather’s kitchen, with two of my cousins and a neighbor kid, and it is, of course, summer. These two cousins and their little sister always came down from Richmond every year when school was out, and spent most of each summer with our grandfather and aunt. Which meant I got to spend pretty much every waking moment of the entire summer with them, because I lived two houses away from our grandfather and aunt.

So, the windows that line one wall of the kitchen are open and we’ve got the old white plastic radio on as we always do, and Seals and Crofts are singing Summer Breeze while our own breeze blows in through the lace curtains. My older cousin is making a pie, and we’re sitting around watching and drinking iced tea out of tall brightly colored tin cups and taste-testing the pie ingredients. The two older girls aren’t picking on me and the same-age-as-me cousin for once, but instead are chatting with us like friends instead of shunning us like the annoying nemeses we usually are.  The kitchen is old-fashioned, with glass-door cabinets that have neat metal latches, and the drawers have pretty little glass knobs. There is a pull-out shelf for kneading bread on, right over the flour-bin cabinet that rocks outwards when you open it. There’s a little shelf over the stove with old milk-glass salt shakers and the kitchen sink is one very deep, chipped, and rust-speckled enamel bowl. A little old battered tin pot with a long handle hangs beside the sink, and everybody drinks water out of it. (Yes. Ewwww.)  There’s a strange teeny little door built into the aqua blue beadboard wall above the grey Formica table. It opens up to a little storage spot where my grandfather keeps his medicine. The floor is checkerboard squares of black and white tile, and there’s a window looking out onto the back porch where Pop keeps a slop bucket.  

We spent a vast amount of time in that house and in that kitchen, but for some reason this memory has never faded. Pop died over thirty years ago, Aunt Mabel died eight years ago. The kitchens my cousins and I spend time in now are usually in Delaware or Maryland. And the worst thing I’ve had to see so far in this life was when I stood and watched that house my grandfather built, that house my father and his sisters and brothers grew up in burn to the ground two winters ago. So I’m grateful to Seals and Crofts for their pretty little harmony-rock anthem that still brings me such a happy vivid memory every time I hear Summer Breeze after all these years and years.