To have a town for the summer

BarcelonaMy friend Alícia told me one day that she would have liked to have a village to spend the summer in. It is a very different concept to have a village than to have a second home on the beach or wherever. In the village you have roots, connections, surely you have relatives there or with a bit of luck your grandparents still live there. Nothing happens in the village, there isn't much and for not having anything, maybe there isn't even a beach. There life stops, the days pass slowly and lazily and the day's work is just waiting for it to be less hot to go out and play in the street.

When I was little, I spent my summers in Juneda, in the region of Les Garrigues. My grandparents lived there and I remember the simple days when with my grandma I used to go shopping in the mornings, to the town's swimming pool in the afternoon, and to enjoy the cool air at night. Going out to the cool air was a ritual I remember with special fondness because I have always loved conversations very much. How pioneering grandmothers were, right? Now that there's so much talk about sisterhood and building community, nothing united us more than taking a chair out to the street to spend time with the neighbors. No screens, no rush, no schedules. A time when everything went at a different pace and when I could go to bed late, wake up late, a nap without sleep was mandatory, and I ate gratinated macaroni when it wasn't a fashionable dish.

My children also have a village and it's in Andalusia. The summer of 2019, I enrolled the two youngest in the summer camp of La Puebla, in the province of Seville. It was an experience that made them grow a lot, they made new friends and they returned very happy to have shared their holidays with their grandparents, aunts, and cousins from the village. I thought that summer would mark the beginning of a beautiful tradition, but you know that then the pandemic came and in the same year, August 2020, the Andalusian grandfather died. It's amazing how everything changes in just one year.

Summers without rush

I'm getting nostalgic writing this, but I think it's very important that we value the importance of unhurried summers where perhaps not much needs to be done. Now we see these three months without school as a burden, where we don't know what to do with so many days because we find it hard to balance. Camps and colonies are expensive, we don't get to everything and there's still September left where we have no resources or energy left. We complain that they have too many holidays, but then we look back and our summers felt too short. I'm the first to complain, I always plan and it's very hard for me to disconnect. I realize with a smile that little Magda was much more patient, calmer and more aware, that to be happy you didn't need to go anywhere. How can it be that our childhood version is often more assertive than the current one?

With a bit of luck and in a very optimistic scenario, we only have eighty summers in life. That's not many, and that's why we have to enjoy them. Of my summers, I hold onto the way my grandmother used to love: silently, generously, and immensely, and that is the best inheritance along with the macaroni recipe. Because childhood summers will live forever within us. Happy summer!