Hello, summer

Summer. Glorious summer. It is every child’s fantasy that threatens to turn into every mother’s nightmare. What is it about too much time that makes for a challenging experience by the end of the long and drawn out holidays? Well, for starters, too much time!

I remember with glee the anticipation I had as a child after completing end-of-year exams and the fun last few days of school prior to the summer break. We had class parties every year on the last day of school right through preparatory school. We were so eager to eat cake and ice cream, sing songs and go home to get on with our holidays.

Summer in the Caribbean meant the meeting of the cousins. It seemed the first half of the holiday was about being scheduled to visit aunts and grandparents and knock stones and butt heads with the cousins who came from far and near.

Those who were overseas were promptly shipped to the birthplace of their parents to soak up as much culture as possible and to keep them busy and out of trouble while their busy parents worked gruelling hours. They came with their funny accents and weird appetites and lots of new treats.

It was from them that we learnt the magical combination of peanut butter and jelly while we shared with them our passion for the ripest, sweetest mangoes summer had to offer. Town cousins discovered new foods and woke up early with country cousins to chime in on the chores that brought food straight from the farm to the table while country cousins did posh town things and got dressed up for the pantomime at the theatre, or rides at the carnival with cotton candy or popcorn or a bottle of soda as a rare treat.

The older, more industrious ones would help us upgrade from the boredom of repetitive mud pies to actually cooking real food. I remember eating loads and loads of succulent, red ripe tomatoes with salt and pepper and cucumbers as they grew abundantly in the summer months on my grandfather’s farm. It is still my all time favourite salad to this day.

As we got older, cooking became more and more a part of the daily escapades and we would rotate a cooking roster, weeding out those who were not good at it and instead making them contribute to other things like going to the shop or washing up.

IN THE NEWS Rumtek Monastery, near Gangtok, was the focus of international media attention in 2000 after the 17th Karmapa, one of the four holiest lamas, fled Lhasa and sought refuge here

The adventurous ones would climb trees and pick green mangoes and mix them with salt and hot Scotch bonnet pepper for a salty, sour snack that left our tongues cracked after having too much.

We went scavenging through the woods for hard to find, hard to pick and hard to eat fruits using sticks and stones as our tools and us girls would use the laps of our skirts and dresses as baskets as we hauled the day’s findings under a nice cool tree and shared amongst us according to age, appetite and who did the most work.

Towards the end of the summer holidays, there was a totally different vibe resonating among those of us who had so excitedly welcomed the freedom of school-free days. Our ‘free paper’ would soon burn and we would have to go back to school. By then the visiting cousins had long returned home, mangoes were going out of season and parents were severely limiting excursions and treats in anticipation of the typical heavy spending associated with back-to-school expenses.

We sat outside sharing belly laughs about the thrills of the holidays, making sure to archive the jokes that would lead to generational tales. In those summer holidays, we not only defined our childhood but also a big part of the adults we would later become.

I know the good old days are long gone in the era of iPads, video games and indoor ski slopes in the desert but it is my hope that somehow as parents we will try to find a way to show our kids what summer is really about by stripping away some of the packaged entertainment and allow them to learn how to truly entertain themselves. And while they are out and about being active and discovering nature, they will be so tired that they will sleep like a dream at night, leaving us to gather as adults in the evenings, sipping our drinks on the balcony and reminiscing about the joys of our own youthful summers.

(For more information, visit www.greenheartuae.com.)

• Food and Dining