Summer is here?

Chicago weather says we are now in their summer schedule. I will take their word for it and think summer fun.
Mornings have been misty but the swans, geese, ducks and great blue heron are loving it.
Here is a summer remembrance from my childhood involving Rapps.

I Remember: A childhood memory of 1942

We moved to a rental house on Center street. It was one half block from the library. Big brother K. was ten and I was nine. Our little brother, Hap, was pre-school.

The nearest neighbor was Ignota Roberts. She had social functions where ladies came in hats and gloves to play bridge. Our parents had poker parties with loud friends and late nights. I may have been slightly prudish because I wanted to be like Ignota.

January 26^th that year, things got serious because the U S landed in Europe to help stop Hitler. Dad was 4F but two of his brothers went. One did not come back.

The biggest song that year was “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition”.

Well before the Bond sales and scrap drives , victory gardens and rationing our family was feeling the pinch and my brother and I thought we were sugar deprived. We search the sofa cushions and watched for any dropped change (from the loud friends), so we could run up to Annie’s or the News Stand to buy candy.

One weekend that summer our seven and eight year old Rapp (Jim and Tom) cousins came to visit. I chanced upon a small box of chocolate in the back of the frig. I shared equally with the boys and threw away the flat little blue box.. Hopefully no one would notice. They did when we all started having stomach pains punctuated with spontaneous evacuations and had to borrow our little brother’s old diapers.
I probably sounded out the words but did not read the fine print on that Ex-lax box. Any cautionary feelings I may have had were overcome by CHOCOLATE.Thank heaven the box was only half full and I thought I had to share or I might have been a very sick little girl.