When I grew up in Germany in the late 1960s and 1970s, we couldn’t wait for the summer to arrive! Only those months without an „r“ we were allowed to run outside barefoot, so we waited till May (which was not so difficult considering the inconsistent weather), but the whole fun was over in September, and that was a problem. In Bavaria, September starts in the middle of our summer vacation. There must’ve been something wrong with their calculations or with their spelling or: both…
My siblings and I would grab our bikes, a towel, a book and some cards and bike over to the Auwaldsee, 3km away from our house. Half of the lakeshore is covered with bushes and trees, the other half is beach. A row boat rental, Minigolf, a relatively big campground with a restaurant and a beergarden. We would always end up at the same area on the beach, always meet neighbors kids, schoolmates, friends. Playing cards, chasing each other, or challenging to swim out to the wood cross that was anchored in the middle of the lake and seemed FAR away! There I got my first kiss and I hated it! I was exhausted from swimming, unable to just turn around right away and kind of caught between two legs of that cross… I never enjoyed swimming out there again despite being a competitive person, especially in sports.
The beach was great. We tanned like Rotissery chicken, using Tiroler Nussöl as a sunscreen, but all it was: it made your skin shiny and good smelling. SPF 5! Kids squealing everywhere, sometimes crying, too tired of that beach life, ready for a nap. Toys set up to make them happy and fulfill the parents dream to get some tan before they had to return to the Netherlands or Denmark.
Sometimes one of us locals would bring a bag of chips (gone in 30 seconds!) or a bottle of lemonade that, upon opening, would cover everybody nearby with a spray of sticky sugar water, because it was cooking in the hot sun for too long. Oh life was good!
And here we are, in the 2020s, at a beach in Italy: a mixed crowd of people of different nationalities, all ages, all at the same beach. Kids squealing because it’s way past nap time, teenagers showing off their bodies, swimming challenges, toys everywhere… of course now we have unicorns innertubes and you can rent windsurfing boards and paddleboards not rowboats. The kids are drenched in sunscreen SPG 50+, they wear longsleeve sunprotection shirts and parents bring a whole bag full of snacks to satisfy everybody’s needs. Tatoos are visible on lots of bodies, now pieces of art. When I was a child, a tattoo was the unmistakeable sign of somebody who had spent time in prison, nowadays it shows a love for body art and a higher discretionary income. Girls giggle, boys are boys, in and out of the water, nothing has ever changed it seems. The cicadas are screaming: summer – summer – summer! And we? We are enjoying our day on the beach like we did way back then. It is hard to get up from that towel on the ground, but hey, we outgrew the chase, we settled into a relaxing enjoyment that you’ll find with age. Life is good!
