To have a village 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 anywhere else. In the village you have roots, connections, you surely 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, perhaps 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 comarca of Les Garrigues. My grandparents lived there and I remember the simple days when I used to go shopping with my grandma in the mornings, to the town's swimming pool in the afternoon, and to the cool night air in the evenings. Going out to the cool night air was a ritual I remember with special fondness because I have always loved conversations very much. How pioneering were grandmothers, right? Now that there's so much talk about sorority and building community, nothing united us more than going out with a chair to the street to spend time with the neighbors. No screens, no rush, no schedules. A time when everything went at another pace and when I could go to bed late, wake up late, a nap without being sleepy was mandatory, and I ate gratinated macaroni when it wasn't a trendy dish.

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

Summers without rush

I'm getting nostalgic writing this piece, 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 struggle with work-life balance. Camps and colonies are expensive, we can't manage everything, and September is still to come when we have no resources or energy left. We complain that they have too many holidays, but then we look back and for us, summer felt too short. I'm the first to complain, I always plan and find it very difficult 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. From my summers, I'll keep the way my grandmother used to love: silent, generous, and immense, and that is the best inheritance along with the macaroni recipe. Because childhood summers will live forever within us. Happy summer!