How beautiful were those days

When I was young, but very young, school started the 1st of October and ended right after mid-June.
We had three full months of vacation. 
It didn't matter, where we would have gone or what we would have done: not going to school was enough to BE on holiday.

To those few, owning a beach house, summer meant moving and changing town and habits for a while. Each year, a renewed adventure, substantially consisting in rediscovering places -and all the changes that had meanwhile occurred- and friends who, year after year, had grown a bit, had new interests and higher goals in life. 
The first get together, after nine months spent away from each other, was tremendously exciting.

To the majority of children instead, that still enjoyed a few weeks by the sea, summer meant mainly home. With mom and grandparents, helping with the household management, and with relatives, coming to visit at least once a week. 
While they were out with their mothers for morning shopping, kids discovered, how the city looked like in that part of the day, they usually spent at school: its streets and their smell, its colorful markets, its morning lights and shadows, its slow rhythms.

Afternoons were spent in the courtyard. By three o'clock, crowds of kids formed clumps playing different games, each child moving from one group to another, depending on his interest of the moment. They were just children, but until dinner time, no adult was around, and so the eldest were keeping an eye on the youngest ones. They experienced responsibility, and, though just for a few hours, freedom.

Today, slow rhythms have turned into rush. Relatives and grandparents are often too busy, or live too far away, to visit every day. Courtyards have disappeared, and if not, they've become too dangerous to leave kids playing unattended. Free time has given way to sport activities and to summer camps, that are away from home.

How beautiful were those days. Days that our children haven't known. And as children, never will.