Popsicle Days

You can keep your watermelon.

You can keep your corn on the cob, your wild blueberries, your fried chicken picnics, your s'mores and your hot dogs.

You can even keep your ice cream.

Let me tell you about a delight - no, an ecstasy - unmatched by anything adulthood has ever offered. Let me tell you about freedom. About power. About decadence and wild abandon. About everything a summer should be.

Let me tell you about Popsicle Days.

I imagine my mother invented Popsicle Days on one of those wringingly humid days. The kind they invented antiperspirant for. The kind that frizzes your hair and limps your shirt. The kind that makes you fight for every steamy breath. The kind where you only feel alive when fully submerged in icy pond water.

The kind that just might wear down a health-nut-working-mother-of-two who normally doesn't do sugary treats.

Popsicle days were definitely a later invention, because it was after my mother stopped being able to convince us that her "popsicles" - diluted orange juice, frozen in Dixie cups with straws sticking out of them - were worth eating. It had to have been after I started school and learned about the glories of those plastic sleeves and their colorful-but-nearly-flavorless contents, sucking the sugary water from the bottom on Field Day, right before school let out.

However it started, it was her greatest invention.

On the hottest days - those real shirt-wringers - Mom would declare a Popsicle Day, and give us unfettered access to the freezer. We'd descend on the pile of neon-colored ice pops with a frenzy otherwise reserved for Halloween candy, elbowing each other to be the first to grab our favorite. (Which, in retrospect, was weird, since we had different favorites. My sister liked red - not cherry, not strawberry, just red - and I liked green or orange.)

We were allowed as many as we wanted, whenever we wanted - even before dinner! It was a lawlessness on par with getting rid of bedtime, or not having to brush our teeth. We ate pop after pop, enjoying the blast of cold air each time we went back for more.

I think my mom enjoyed the freedom, too - a little reprieve from the pressure to be the mom who fed us the right things and read us the right books and played the right games. Maybe she justified it to herself by saying at least it kept us hydrated. Maybe she was remembering the Good Humor truck of her childhood, how her own mother would toss a dime down from the second story window so she could go buy ice cream with the other kids, and how glorious it felt to have the coin clenched in her sweaty palm, alight with all that choice and possibility.

Maybe she wanted us to enjoy that sliver of sugary anarchy. Maybe she just wanted us out of her hair, to take a cool bath in peace and hide in the one air-conditioned room in the house after a long day in nylons and shoulder pads.

Popsicle Days were a sneaky little joy, a thing we dared not ask for but hoped for. I think we knew that if we begged or whined or even hinted that it might be hot enough, sticky enough, gross enough to be a Popsicle Day that we might ruin it. That she might remember herself, straighten her back and abolish the practice.

She never did.

When the weatherman calls for the first heat wave of the summer, I head to the grocery store and I stock up. Fudgsicles are my favorite, and ice cream sandwiches. I'll buy some candy bars to freeze and gnaw on, a few cups of Italian ice if I'm in the mood.

But I always grab a bag of those not-yet-frozen plastic pops, looking for bags that seem to have more than the average amount of green ones. I keep them close to the front of the freezer, and on hot days, when everything is wilted and even the tomato plants are panting, I pull them out one by one, savoring the tiny taste of anarchy and freedom, of that blast of cold air, and ice pops before dinner.