Summer in Five Baskets

[Images by SB Sandy. Poem by David Budbill. SB SM]

Summer Blues

You got to understand: here

Winter stays six months a year–

Mean, mean winters and too long.

Ninety days is what we get, just

Ninety days of frost free weather.

I know you don’t believe it but . . .

Ninety days is all we get. Just

Ninety days of frost free weather.

And in that lousy, puny, crummy,

Stinkin’, measly ninety days we just

Got to get outside and get together!

Now I said, ninety days is all we get.

Just Ninety days of frost-free weather

(Believe it, honey, ’cause it’s true)

Ninety days is all we get, just

Ninety days of summer weather.

So you can see how we just got to, we

Just got to get outside and get together.

I said, OUTSIDE! OUTSIDE!

We got to get OUTSIDE!

And get together.

And in those ninety days we got to:

Grow tomatoes, beans, potatoes,

Corn, squash, cucumbers and thyme.

Have barbecues, and a day out on a

Mountain we can climb.

We got to:

Raise some flowers and some pigs

Build a shed and mow the lawn,

Pick blueberries and mushrooms

And go skinny-dippin’ in the pond.

Got to:

Go to the fair, have sex with warm feet

Put up a thousand thousand tons of hay,

Go to some dances out of doors

And cop some rays!

Ow! Ninety days is all we get.

Just ninety days of frost free weather.

And in that lousy, puny, crummy,

Stinkin’, measly ninety days we just

Got to get outside and get together!

I said, I said, we got to

Get outside and get together.

And then at night after we been

Skinny-dippin in the pond

We got to make a campfire

And have a cookout on the lawn.

We got to eat some chicken,

Lie around the fire, drink some wine,

Then watch the night sky let a

Billion, billion stars come out to shine.

I said, OUTSIDE! OUTSIDE!

We just got to get OUTSIDE!

And get together.

David Budbill

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DAVID BUDBILL was born in 1940 in Cleveland, Ohio to a streetcar driver and a minister’s daughter. In 1969 he and his wife, Lois Eby, moved from New York City to Northern Vermont where they lived together for 47 years until his death in 2016. David’s colorful life included being a track star in high school, attending Union Theological Seminary in New York City, teaching at Lincoln University (a historically Black college in Pennsylvania), laboring on a Christmas tree farm, playing myriad musical instruments, working for racial and economic justice, tending a large vegetable garden, cutting his own wood, riding a mountain bike, and writing a staggering amount of creative material. David had a gift with the written word, with storytelling, and with striking the heart of the matter with astonishing clarity and simplicity.