When will (did) summer begin

     Now that we have solemnly observed Memorial Day -- or did we celebrate Veteran's Day? Or was it sort of a combination of both, because we don't know the difference, any more than we know the difference between patriotism and jingoism?  -- Anyway, now that the first official holiday of the warmer season has passed, it's time to get serious about spending a frivolous summer.
     If that's confusing, how about the weather?  We had hot weather in February and April, cold weather in early May, now it's hot again. The almanac says summer officially begins with the summer solstice on June 20, but I'll bet that not four in ten people can tell you what the summer solstice is. Which is why we have official dates set on the calendar to tell us summer has arrived.
     When I was a kid, summer arrived the first day I didn't wear a jacket to school, and walking through the grass soaked my new tennis shoes with dew. May was not a month; it was a holding pattern, part of a conspiracy by adults to keep us bottled up for a few more days before we had the run of the town until the day after Labor Day.
     Summer was the epitome of life itself. It defined all human endeavor. Sleep until you felt like getting up, stay up at night until you collapsed into bed, full of ice cream or watermelon.
    On the hottest days, before the water ban police, we'd run through the sprinkler set up with the garden hose tied to the clothesline. For those not fully educated in history, a clothesline was one or more ropes or wires between posts in the back yard, where housewives, a prehistoric life form usually consisting of domesticated females, clipped wet laundry with clothespins (clever use of language) to dry in the sun.
     You could tell well-to-do families, because their children donned swimsuits for the frolic in the icy spray. Poorer kids, and younger siblings, ran tippy-toed in their underwear, shrieking and laughing as if life was fair.
     Most of us grew up thinking that only movie stars, insurance salesmen and other tycoons had swimming pools in the back yard.
     A few community pools served vast geographic areas; there was Frock's Sunnybrook Farm in Westminster, Meadowbrook in Silver Run, and another pool fed by melting glaciers at Pleasant Hill, north of the Pennsylvania line on the road between Manchester and Hanover.  There might have been pools in Hanover, or perhaps other communities in Carroll County, but for a kid growing up in Manchester, Westminster was the edge of the known world, and Hanover was where you went to buy your school shoes or go to air-conditioned movies, and wasn't considered good for much else.
     Summer cookouts were invented sometime in the early 1950s. Before the first backyard charcoal grill was used to incinerate innocent chickens or sacrifice hot dogs and burgers to the gods of A Day Off, families might visit any one of many picnic groves on local farms, where you played games in the grassy meadows and running streams -- games like squish the cow pies between your toes.
     The men would drink beer and smoke cigars and get louder as the sun got hotter, and the women would lay out their homemade fried chicken and potato salad. In the evening, the kids would capture lightning bugs and keep them in glass jars with grass for a mini habitat -- before the word was even invented -- with air holes punched in the lids. This ritual was full of wonder, one of which was, Why do lightning bugs die?
     It was usually summer when it would dawn on a kid that girls were not just boys with different haircuts.  It wasn't long after that revelation that the definition of summer was changed forever.