Summer is such a great time of the year. I appreciate all that it has to offer more than most because I detest winter. The only thing that makes the cold, snow and ice tolerable is basketball season, which manages to slooooowly get me to spring.

Summer has special meaning because it’s the season that I enjoyed the most as a kid. Some of the things I still do 40 years later. Others, like spending hours at the Shenango River or Pymatuning Lake with rod and reel in hand, regrettably have gone by the boards.

We’ve reached the part of the summer that was always one of my favorites — gardens are bearing their fruits and locally grown produce is readily available. When I was a kid, they came from my grandfather’s lush garden, which he tended on a daily basis. Today, they come from a couple of my favorite stands and the farmer’s markets.

Peppers, zucchini and corn top my list. I could eat fresh sweet corn every day while it’s in season. We have all kinds being sold these days, from sugar and butter to bodacious, but give me any ear of corn with melted butter, salt and a fair amount of black pepper and I’ll be happy.

As a kid, I used to watch my grandfather and my mother slowly fry fresh peppers in olive oil and a little salt. What a great sandwich — fried peppers in oil and fresh Italian bread. Another one of my summer favorites with homegrown veggies was fresh slices of tomato, onion, salt and pepper, drizzled with a little olive oil between two thick slices of fresh bread.

Summer nights are great too, but nothing can come close (and never has) to spending hours on the big front porch at my grandfather’s house in Farrell, where we lived when I was a kid. The porch, like most of them in the row houses, was well above street level and provided a great vantage point for the area.

Because the houses were close on that part of Emerson Avenue, it was a nightly ritual to carry on conversation with your neighbors, some three or four houses away. As the night lingered toward midnight, many times all one could hear were the clinking noises from Sharon Steel Corp., the chirping of crickets, and, of course, Pirates announcer Bob Prince emanating from my grandfather’s transistor radio.

My house in Sharpsville, where I have lived for nearly 25 years, has a front porch, sort of. It’s about four feet wide, eight feet long and at street level, a far cry from my days in Farrell with gliders, chairs, tables, and pull-down shades to keep out the setting sun. I’ll bet in 25 years, I have spent a total of two hours on my porch ... that isn’t.

Talk to kids today about sleeping out and few if any will have a clue about it. In today’s society, you can’t blame parents for banning it. But back in the day, sleeping out in the backyard and summer went hand in hand.

We would grab our sleeping bags, lanterns, munchies and spend countless nights under the stars. Sleeping out seems like a misnomer, because we talked a lot and slept very little. Only in a threat of rain did we put up a crude tent. Going into the house never was much of an option.

The great thing about it was that parents never worried in the slightest about us. Even if they looked out and we weren’t there, they knew we were somewhere in town, sneaking around after curfew and playfully dodging the police. Farrell was such a safe town when I was a kid.

Of course, summer meant baseball, baseball and more baseball. When we didn’t have room to play baseball, we played Wiffle Ball. We learned how to hit a curveball by swinging at bottle caps. Whether it was in a field, in a yard, or on the bricks of Emerson Avenue “under the lights,” we were always playing ball.

Because of the great memories, summer always has held a special place in my heart. I don’t sleep out, I don’t have much of a porch, and a round or two of golf a week has replaced fishing along the banks of the Shenango River. (With my game, I should quit golf and start fishing again.)