Memories part three

Beth asked "what did YOU do in the summers, when you were, say ten?"

Growning up in Toronto, we divided our summers between home and visiting our distant relatives. In even-numbered years we would spend a month with my mother's family on various farms in Saskatchewan, and in odd-numbered years with my father's family in London (England); the other month we spent at home "relaxing" = working in the garden under Mom's direction, moving trees and relaying faux-cobblestoned walkways (you probably think I'm joking).

Returning to Toronto after a month in England or Saskatchewan had a defining moment: a wave of heat that rolled into the airplane as the door was opened, the temperature rose by fifteen degrees (celcius!) and the humidity by sixty percent in one second. This was so intense that I often believed that I could see a flicker in the air as the wave rolled towards us. It was a social moment: the passengers would all gasp and cough, then look at each other and smile wryly: ah yes, we're home.

Toronto meant oppressive heat and humidity: temperatures that remained in the mid-thirties (over 90°F) for weeks on end, with humidity so high that you wondered why steel didn't rust in the air. My commonest memory of those days is of feeling the sweat literally flowing down my arms and chest as I sat indoors.

Toronto meant being outdoors every for possible minute of the day, because the house was just intolerably hot. (Our house has so-called cathedral ceilings, meaning that there's no attic: the upstairs rooms go right up to the inclined plane of the roof. The sun was therefore beating down directly onto the tops of the rooms, which would be baking hot by mid-morning.) We set up lawn chairs and a portable table in the shade of the sunburst locust tree, and ate every meal outside. We ate a lot of salads in the summer, to avoid having to cook in the heat. (I'm pretty sure that we didn't have takeaways, though, which would have been another solution. I only remember them during school times.)

Toronto meant early mornings, to make the most of the overnight cooling. If the night had been clear (no clouds) the temperature at daybreak might be as low as 18°, so you would be in the odd position of needing to wear a jacket at dawn but being too hot for a t-shirt at midday. The dew would be as thick as rainfall on the lawn, your shoes would be soaked through walking from the back door to the garden fence. Within three hours, the dew would have burned off and the temperature would be nudging into the eighties.

Toronto meant late and long evenings, to make the most of the (however slight) cooling-off from midday. We often went for walks in the hour before sunset, returning home through the park at dusk. We would stop at the crest of the hill and look out across the city or up at the stars. After sunset we would open up all windows and doors, to attempt to flush the hot sticky air of daytime out of the upstairs rooms. Another common memory is of sitting at night in my father's chair, feeling the gentle breeze through the screen door and listening to the hiss and rustle of lawn sprinklers from further down the street.

After a few years we discovered a two-part solution to the oppressive heat: we got a dehumidifier and put it into the basement, where we then spent all our time when not outside. The combination of reduced humidity and shelter from the sun made an enormous difference: it was actually comfortable down there even on the hottest days. (Mom used the water that the dehumidifier extracted from the air - up to two gallons a day! - to water the garden and indoor flowers.)

Toronto meant day-long trips downtown, leaving early in the morning and returning towards sunset to avoid being on the road under the sun. Neither buses nor the subway were airconditioned in those far-off days, dear reader; being stuck in traffic in 30° weather in the blazing sun was not pleasant. We went to the AGO or the ROM or in later years to the Science Centre, where we could spend a whole day in airconditioned comfort (but not feel guilty because it was educational).

We would also sometimes go to the Islands or the Scarborough Beaches for the day, or to Edwards Gardens and then walk along the long, thin park of the Don River valley, a narrow steep-sided ravine that runs the width of the city down to the lake. I loved going to the Islands, partly because getting there was so adventurously complicated. We took a bus to the subway junction, then rode the subway down to the lakeshore, then took a twenty-minute ferry ride across to Centre Island. It was always much cooler out on the lake, because of the constant breeze. We would walk the length of the outer boardwalk, have lunch (hot dogs! a rare treat) then walk among the moored boats and little wooden houses of the smaller islands until it was time to return.

Toronto meant spending the day at the local swimming pool (in the same park where we would walk in the evenings), but the pool was too small and too shallow for big kids to be comfortable in so that didn't last long. ("We" in this case means my mother and us kids, because my father would be at work.) Nobody wore hats, nobody used sunscreen. It was a given that you'd just tan and/or burn all summer long. I would be as brown as mahogany when the first day of school came around.

Toronto meant power failures, brownouts and blackouts. In my memory there would be one a week during the hottest month, in the early evening, when the office workers returned home and turned on their airconditioners. This too was a social moment, people would gather on the street to enjoy the dark and the quiet. I was intrigued that the telephone would still work although the lights were out. (This stopped after the nuclear power station was built at Pickering.)

It wasn't all family events, of course, we had friends in the neighbourhood with whom we would play. Nobody had airconditioning in those days, so we were united in suffering (so to speak). In later years, one of my friends' parents had a proper in-ground heated pool put into the back yard; I spent a lot of time there either in the pool or throwing a frisbee around or playing cards in the cool of the basement. Z was a jazz fan at a time when the rest of us were into hard (harsh) rock, the soundtrack to these summers was Chicago, Deodato, Pink Floyd, Tangerine Dream - or Z himself who was and is a fine pianist. I find it good and fitting that Z's sons now play in that pool.

It also wasn't all fun, of course. Grass grows fast and thick under such conditions, one of us (usually me) had to mow the lawn once a week, which I complained about but secretly quite enjoyed. We planted and replanted trees and bushes, moved flowerbeds, and laid and relaid paths and sitting areas at my mother's whims. Every Spring she would order a truckload of manure (perhaps less often, but in my memory it was frequent and regular) which would be dumped on our driveway, and over the following afternoons we would transport this by wheelbarrow into the various flower beds to be distributed and worked into the soil. The gardens were a constant project for Mom; it wasn't that she was dissatisfied with the way they looked, but they would change as the plants grew and one day she'd decide that they were no longer pretty. So all the bushes and shrubs would be dug out and given away to friends and neighbours, the bulbs and perennials would be dug up and put aside for replanting, the holes would be filled with manure and the whole mess dug over and redesigned. The flowerbeds shifted around in our garden from year to year like sandbars in a fast-flowing river.

Toronto meant bicycles. I had a sequence of bikes over the years, and rode routes that expanded to suit the machine. On my first bike I would ride the length of the street we lived on and back. With my second bike, a three-speeder, I graduated to riding as far as the school I walked to, and the streets that branched off of that way. I got a ten-speed racing bike for my birthday when I was fourteen or so, and from then on my summer days were spent in the saddle far from home. I would cycle down to the lake and back (around 22 miles) at least once a week, either on my own or with the cardplaying crew. One memorable time, we rode all the way to the Humber River on the western border of the city, rode the valley park down to the lakeshore, then back through the city: around 35 miles. That was really hard work, though, because most of it was along busy city streets, so we didn't do it again.