I thought this post would be a lamentation for this year’s nonexistent summer vacation. After reading Cynthia Zarin’s essay, “Fantasy Island,” in which she describes a less than perfect summer vacation at a house on Swann Island, in Maine, my thoughts turn to remembering golden summers of my distant past. As Zarin describes her thwarted plans for lovely gourmet family meals, I think about bologna burgers with Velvetta cheese and pigs in a blanket. As she describes lobster every day, I think about roadside orange juice stands.

When I was young my family would take a two week summer vacation every year for many years. My parents, maternal grandparents, brother, and I would hop in a green Chevy Malibu station wagon and green Ford Ranger truck and head south from Kentucky to Florida. Pulling a modest camper, made for families traveling from KOA campground to KOA campground, we made our way. My grandparents survived The Great Depression and World War, so thrift was a way of life on the open road. My parents were/are avid readers, so our trips included summer reading, too. In general, we swam in campground pools and the ocean, played in the sand wherever we could find it, and read all the books we brought along from our library’s summer reading program.

Each year was a different Florida destination, usually framed by stopping by my great Aunt Martha and Uncle Byron’s house in Lake Wales where I learned to whittle, and would beg every year to be taken to Spook Hill where gravity literally pulls your car up a hill. We stopped at roadside attractions to see mermaids on water skis, glass bottom boats and manatees, and alligators sunning themselves in quasi-safari style. We dressed up for one fancy dinner per trip at the gloriously over the top (even to a child) Kapoc Tree Inn. I drank Shirley Temples and strolled through lion-headed gardens. We, of course, did the obligatory Disney World trips, which included going to Epcot’s opening summer. Living in Florida as an adult, I appreciate the magic of those years even more.

I sit here today thinking about right now. Cancelled plans. Past island adventures. Disney World has become a way of life the last few years and going there can’t safely happen in the current world. I cherish memories of my Florida childhood vacations. Nostalgia can be a strange elixir. It can take us to a place that somehow is better than it was when it happened. It can help us polish the gems of experience. It can help us get through difficult times by helping us remember that there once were better times and that there will be better times again. It can even make us appreciate our current situation through new eyes.

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