Sounds of summer from my childhood:

The sound of wind in birch trees.
I spent all my summers at my grandma’s summer cottage in Kiisa, together with her and my brother, and my parents for part of the summer. She had a largish garden, mostly cultivated and full of flowerbeds, a kitchen garden, fruit trees and so on.
At the bottom of the garden there was a wilder area with weeds and thistles. At the other edge of that area there was a stand of trees, mostly birches. She had a rope hammock between two of them. We used to lie in it and solve crossword puzzles together.

The sound of lawnmowers.

The distant sound of saws and hammers. I guess our neighbours were building things.

The sound of swallows.

The sound of weather reports on the radio. I cannot remember listening much to the radio much at home, but my grandma had a small battery-operated radio that she used to listen to. News reports, weather reports, other things I cannot remember.
The closest weather station to Kiisa was Kuusiku, so I knew to listen for that word. Vahelduva pilvisusega kuiv ilm. Tuul puhanguline, valdavalt lõunakaarest, 5 kuni 7 meetrit sekundis.

The sound that I currently most strongly associate with summer is the song of blackbirds. They are plentiful around here. I like sitting out on the deck in the evenings and listening to them sing.

They go to sleep before I do.

I’ve been thinking for a while about starting to write down some memories of my childhood here.

Some random memories keep circling in my head, resurfacing again and again. Writing things down tends to get them out of my head.

I generally have a pretty lousy long-term memory. Other people – friends, family – ask me if I remember this or that event or detail, and usually I don’t. Sometimes I have a factual memory that the trip they talk about did happen, but have no personal recollections of it. Sometimes I don’t even have a clue of what they’re talking about.

An old classmate recently linked to his blog posts with memories from school. He remembers teachers’ names and can link events to particular school years. I mostly have no memories of all the things he writes about. But I can remember the “feeling” of the new, young maths teacher we got some time in middle school, and the feeling of the dank basement canteen.

I remember random tidbits, loose fragments, what a particular place or moment or activity felt like. Out of nowhere I can sometimes recall the experience and feeling of cycling down a particular street in London, or what it felt like to be standing on a crowded bus in Tartu.

I wish I had more photos from my childhood; photos tend to jog my memory best. I wish people had smartphones back then and took endless photos of ordinary school days.

Maybe writing down the things I do remember will also jog other memories.

There is a possibility that this mini-project will fade away soon after my vacation ends and I will have to start focusing on work again. We’ll see.

Ingrid’s swimming lessons brought to mind my own first ones. We had mandatory swimming lessons when I was in 2nd grade, 8 years old. I remember them as scary and not much fun, and I remember how the pool water made my eyes sting and how awful those exercises were where we were supposed to keep our eyes open in the water in order to pick up some ball or thing from the bottom of the pool. I still totally hate opening my eyes underwater, it makes my eyes itch and my tears run.

I didn’t learn to swim in those lessons, because I fell ill with pneumonia after a few of them, and you weren’t given a second chance if you missed the first one. I later picked up swimming on my own, in a lake during the summer.

Tartu’s old swimming pool has been abandoned in favour of the new water centre that was built some years ago. We walked past the old one this summer. For some reason the pool is still there, and so are the poolside seats, although the building around it has been torn down, and a new building is standing where the showers and changing rooms used to be. In the photo below the big pool is in the front – you can see the darkish rectangles at the end of each lane as well as the spots where the lane marker ropes used to be attached. The teaching pool is in the rear, behind the big one.