The 7 day forecast on the local TV news app confirms the calendar has flipped to July.
You don’t need technology to recognize hot temperatures are here. Open a door to the outside and you’ll feel the sticky Alabama air.
It’s summertime.
Two pair of swim goggles hang from bar stools in my kitchen. Ice cream trucks jingle through our neighborhood. Bedtime, like the early sunsets of the season, stretches later and later.
But the surest snapshot of summer will, to me, always be an orange Igloo water jug and a yellow box of Popsicles. You know, the red, purple and orange ones.
Nobody ever wanted the orange ones.
Those brightly colored containers cradle more than the cool refreshment of my childhood. They also carry memories of Vacation Bible School at Bayview Baptist Church, always the first week of August.
Dozens of kids swarmed the church parking lot during VBS afternoons playing tag or kickball or jump rope.
Sonny Coe sat on the edge of his pickup truck bed next to the orange Igloo cooler that’s etched in my mind, a stack of cone-shaped white paper cups also on his tailgate.
It wasn’t just hot. It was Alabama-in-August hot.
Sonny’s water cooler was an oasis on a sea of asphalt. Sweaty and red-faced we lined up for refreshment, biding time until the wooden white doors were opened, inviting us into the (literal) sanctuary of air-conditioning.
From our pews inside we pledged allegiance to the American flag, the Christian flag and the Bible, “God’s Holy Word.”
We sang about the “Joy, Joy, Joy, Joy” down in our hearts, and if the devil didn’t like it he could “sit on a tack.”
In our basement classrooms, we placed foil star stickers – red or blue or green or gold or silver – next to our names on the attendance chart.
We learned about Bible characters from paper cutouts placed on a felt-covered board.
We made picture frames from popsicle sticks to hold Polaroid pictures of ourselves, which we proudly displayed at parents’ night.
Teachers could have collected enough sticks to craft those frames from the frozen treats we devoured at evening’s end.
Popsicles were a signature Bible School snack.
Memaw Granade, known also on Sunday mornings for her purse filled with an array of Wrigley’s gum, greeted us in front of the Fellowship Hall each evening at the conclusion of VBS class. Smiling, and with the proverbial patience of Job, she held her yellow Popsicle box and tried to honor our flavor requests.
We never asked for cherry, grape or orange; instead we called for the corresponding color.
“Red! Purple!”
If we didn’t get what we wanted we tried to trade with a generous or less picky friend.
Many, many summers have passed since I stood in line at Sonny Coe’s orange cooler or picked a Popsicle from Memaw Granade’s yellow box.
Memories refresh me now.
The hot asphalt on my feet. The cool air-conditioning on my skin. The warm spirit that made Bayview Baptist Church “home.”
What are you thirsty for in this season of summer and life?
Refreshment can be found in varied places.
In a parking lot.
In a pew.
In a Popsicle.
Or, in people.
People like Sonny Coe and Memaw Granade who stood outside in the sticky, August-in-Alabama air to offer refreshment and, with it, the love of Jesus.
Because only in Him are we truly refreshed.
“Taste and see that the Lord is good. How happy is the man who takes refuge in Him.”
(Psalm 34:8)
