In my boy-days, it was traditional (by which I mean it may have happened three or four years in a row) for school to start today. It was a benevolent system, really, of easing us back into the daily grind. Three days of school, then a three day weekend for Labor Day, four days of school, a two day weekend, and then five days a week until the next legal holiday.
So I thought this might be a nice time to look back at postcards dealing with the summer romance. This was not an invention of modern times. As long as there have been ways to step away from work and/or home for a couple of weeks, there have been interesting romantic opportunities. Let parents and preachers warn against the dangers of giving your heart (to go no further) to someone you saw only fourteen days out of the year, the excitement of people from other places and other walks of life always attracted.
Even if it was just a matter of seventy or eighty miles away: the difference between town and country was far more marked in the days before the radio and television began to homogenize us. There was something piquant in meeting people who dressed completely differently from all your friends, and who not only thought YOU had an accent, but thought that that accent was cute.
Someone you might not have looked at twice back home was exotic in those clothes and with that vocabulary. And, in any case, it was summer.
Many of them had been looking forward to summer, too, and a sweet, no strings attached romance. (Or only strings of their tying.)
As always, people from the cities loved to go out on the water. Some people go for the swimming, while some look forward to the fishing. More are interested in a long ride, just the two of you, by moonlight, when no one among your elders can, er, correct your pronunciation of the names of the constellations the two of you have rowed out to see.
By the way, this is NOT the source of the word “canoodling”, but I do appreciate this caption writer’s work in the area of punning.
Just about any place your family went on its holidays, though, there were bound to be places your host knew about (and your parents didn’t, and with any luck, neither did theirs), where a young couple could do some serious discussion of current political and social issues.
Natural caution was advised in these matters, of course.
NEXT TIME: Summer Is Not Endless
Blogsy Babbles 