I think these are the most valuable days of the year. In the daytime it’s warm and quiet and sometimes so still that the only things moving are those little blue dragonflies that occasionally land on you while you’re sitting in an old wooden chair, drinking iced tea and reading a book.
But the nights are what make these days so special. They’re sultry and magical, better than anything we could imagine during the bleak depths of winter. To fully appreciate them we need to sleep under the stars, and renew our familiarity with the sounds and smells of the midsummer night.
These nights are not just for dreams. There’s something about them that helps friends share thoughts and stories they’ve kept to themselves too long. That same mysterious quality is what builds treasured family memories when routines are ignored and bedtimes relaxed.
I suspect that if you collected favorite memories from a group of people, some would be from holidays and special occasions but the ones closest to their hearts would be from warm July nights playing with friends or sitting with their families doing some activity by lantern light.
There were several other children in the neighborhood when our kids were young. They played flashlight tag with a relentless dedication that used to amaze me. I think they would have played all night if I hadn’t called them in by blowing an old World War I bugle, which I can’t actually play.
While flashlight tag or Sardines or No Bears Are Out Tonight are fun games, I think the real value of a midsummer night can be found in doing something frightfully old-fashioned, such as a family game involving cards or dice. Smart phones and tablets tend to isolate people. Old-fashioned games help families rediscover each other, especially when they’re played on a muggy evening.
If you don’t have a favorite game, allow me to suggest one that’s perfect for July nights. It’s called Yahtzee. To play it you need five dice and a scorecard. You can either buy a current version of the game or simply copy one of the many images of the scorecard online.
The game was supposedly developed by a group of friends, one of whom had a yacht on which they played it. They apparently approached game entrepreneur Edwin S. Lowe and offered it to him in exchange for some professionally done versions of end product they could use as gifts.
There’s enough thinking and strategy in the game to be engaging, and kids can often score better than adults, which of course gives them great satisfaction and another excuse to feel superior. I don’t have stock in Hasbro so I’m not saying there’s anything special about Yahtzee. Any family activity will do.
But there’s something about these miraculous midsummer days that makes it easier to put aside our busy schedules, our cell phones and all our internet gadgets and build the kinds of memories that will seem so important later on when that phase of life has passed.
It’s so easy to let these days slip by but time spent with friends and family on a hot night is time well invested in one of the most valuable things we have.
