Naked Season ended today.
I went outside and mowed the lawn and emptied out the plastic swimming pool. It's been too cool for swimming for a couple of weeks now, and the swimming pool was filling up with leaves and getting gunky.
Our yard here is small -- maybe a fifth the size of our yard in Germany. But it's pleasant enough; grass, lots of trees. And there are high walls around it. I brought out the hose for cleaning the pool, and before long the kids got their hands on it and started spraying each other. It was a sunny day, and warm for mid-September, so in very little time they were running around naked.
They do this a lot, in summer. In Germany nobody cares. (Well, we do have to remind the two little ones that they're not supposed to run out into the front yard or the sidewalk. But it's not like anyone is going to call the cops if the five-year-old is drawing with chalk on the front driveway while au naturel.) Moldova's a lot more conservative in some ways, but our yard has a high wall all the way around. So, lots of spraying! and splashing! and yelling! for an hour or two on a sunny Saturday afternoon, while Claudia was out shopping and I was taking apart the pool and doing random bits of minor yard work.
Naked Season ended around 3 pm in the afternoon of Saturday, September 17, with shivering little boys wrapped in towels. After Claude came home we had a late lunch, then some television, then books, then dinner. The days are getting shorter quickly as the year tumbles down towards the equinox, and it's not likely there'll be another afternoon quite so sunny and warm.
Next year, if we're in Germany, we'll break out the hose and sprinkler sometime in May. If we're somewhere else... well, we may be someplace where local mores don't allow little kids to run around with no clothes on. Or we may just not have a yard. We really don't know.
Meanwhile, though, they had an afternoon of spraying each other with hoses. Which is always good.
Wonder how they'd react to a nude negro law in germany. They cant get this law passed in florida for nothing. And southern florida is warm enough all year round for something like that.
Posted by: John | October 03, 2011 at 01:02 AM