As any crossword puzzler will tell you, that's a tricky clue. It's not "nice," as in "Be nice now," but the French city, pronounced "Nees," and the answer is "ete," with right-leaning accents over the two e's, meaning it's pronounced "ay-tay," the French word for "summer."
Summer is my season for hibernation in my old age, more of my contrariness. I'd reform the calendar, going back to the Romans' original ten months by taking out the two imperial ones, miserable saunas that they are. I've long known they were named for the two most illustrious emperors, but only recently I discovered they were originally number names, in a superior book about numbers, Georges Ifrah's The Universal History of Numbers: From Prehistory to the Invention of the Computer (everything you need to know and didn't even know you needed to know). From the fifth on, Romans threw away the baby names list and called their sons Quintus, Sixtus, Septimus, that is, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, etc. Likewise, in their calendar, which began originally with March/Martius, their fifth and sixth months were Quintilis and Sixtilis until renamed for Julius Caesar and Caesar Augustus, though the rest of the year retained the number names. Those numbers went wrong when the Romans added January and February before March, making Seventh/Septembris/September #9 instead of its original #7. (October most clearly reflects its original number name, connected to "octagon," "octet," other eights, though it's now #10 in sequence.)
Anyway, a cousin in Missouri, who moved from a California beachfront--well, a few blocks from the Pacific--to a small northwest Missouri town and probably regrets it, wrote about "this miserable heat wave, 106 [degrees] on the bank therm . . . I am so-so grateful for A.C. I do remember when we had no fans, no power and slept outside for heat relief."
That sent me down--certainly not Nostalgia Lane, given how I feel about heat and humidity now. When the humidity and the dew point rise above 50 and the heat climbs into the upper 80s, I hunker down behind drawn blinds in the shadows cooled by my hard-working air conditioner. Yet once upon a time I went to church camp--as a high school sophomore or junior (?)--for a week when we stayed in dorms that were merely wood shells with no inside finishing and the temperature hit 114 one day so that Mom had to bring a whole new set of clothes up to me after I made seven changes, as I recall. That was at old Niobrara State Park, now demolished and flooded over since the Niobrara River decided to make its main channel the old Mormon Canal (1846) that ran around the west and north sides of the park, the main river channel in my time the eastern boundary with its big bridge.
That park was a central summer feature back in the Forties and Fifties, no town having a swimming pool then. With a waterway through the park for boating and fishing, the park had a large lagoon for swimming with a high diving tower at the northeast end, an underground fence of wooden posts strung with a heavy cable on the north side for the nonswimmers' and children's area. Near the lagoon, besides the bathhouses for changing, a big pop stand with raised window boards on all four sides was my favorite destination, where I relished trading a nickel or a dime for a dark brown ribbed bottle of Orange Crush or, second choice, the patterned Nehi bottles of grape or root beer. West of the swimming area were the best picnic shelters because they sat near a large lily pond with lotus and gold fish (long before koi became fashionable on H & G T V). Such pools would be a public menace today generating lawsuits, and the pop comes in cans from brightly lit machines, progress, of course.
Across the highway from the south entrance sat the park superintendent's house. Behind it, as a special attraction, was a row of cages of mostly exotic birds I liked, such as the peacock and golden pheasant, plus a few animals like some deer. Featured on a popular postcard, a swinging bridge was close to the entrance. A set of buildings not far from the entrance was specifically for group outings, 4H and church camps, with a big mess hall, an assembly hall, the rough dorms, some other buildings. The park had small minimalist white cabins, one of which my Omahan Uncle Chet and his family rented for a week every summer. The park also had some larger, more deluxe cabins built of logs stained dark brown like the big open shelter houses. The park furniture was a kind of Adirondack, rough wooden furniture of small peeled tree trunks, like small posts, nailed together for outdoor benches and chairs built in the Adirondack style and painted white. I did not like the water from the little pumps because of its high mineral content, artesian well water.
We had many, many picnics there, and I'm not just talking about the Center High School closing day picnics when I had my first clandestine cigarette. That's where we held many family reunions and took several of the snapshots in my scrapbook. That's where we went on the Fouth of July or any other special occasion. Summer was fried chicken and potato salad and apple pie for picnics generally up at the park. For all the fuss over food poisoning, the food was left out on the tables, ice mainly in the fat, squat coolers of Kool Aid (a Hastings NE invention), iced tea, or lemonade, or--if we were lucky--an ice-cream churn to be cranked or a canvas-covered insulated ice cream container. The park had low grills, outdoor stone fire pits with charred grills where we could have small fires for roasting hot dogs and marshmallows and keeping speckled enamel coffee pots warm; the shelter houses had big stone fireplaces. We didn't have aluminum cans then, much less all the other modern camping paraphernalia. I think we may have gotten ice cream cones or bars at the hugely popular pop stand, but it seems we had to go into the old town to the drug store or cafes. Picnics in those decades and earlier were also held in outdoor groves, town parks where they existed, country school yards on the last day for pupils and their families, or Up West, north of Newport, at a small dam pond with a merry-go-round, a see-saw, and some picnic tables for the Old Settlers' Picnic in a grassy meadow and no shade.
Picnic days always meant busy mornings as Mom had frying pans sizzling with chicken and made pies from scratch (no Betty Crocker pie crust then), generally with apples from Gramma and Grampa's farm orchard. I was delegated to help by boiling and peeling the eggs and potatoes for the potato salad, dumping cans of peas for pea salad, gathering potato chips and other snacks, mixing the Kool Aid (grape and cherry were best, though the new lemon-lime and black cherry grew popular fast) or squeezing the lemons. I think Gramma generally baked a chocolate cake as well as pies. Just to recall it is to realize how much time we took and how much was not store bought, not convenience foods but made from the real produce. We had to be healthier accordingly, and I don't remember much cancer then, though my home area is rife with it now with no explainable cause. Store stuff cost too much, which is why we often baked our own bread, the soft Old Home white bread an expensive treat when I was little. Ironically, of course, now store bread is cheap, whereas Panera's and the Great American Harvest charge healthy prices for their breads, though baking my own, as I often do, is still cheapest. Definitely not the days when Rachel Ray could whip up 30-minute meals from expensive prepared ingredients. Gramma supplied us with much of our cream, eggs, and chickens, which Mom taught me how to wring their heads off and clean them, easier than chopping their heads off as I discovered, dunking them in boiling water and plucking the feathers, very labor-intensive as opposed to the Colonel's KFC assembly lines. I'm talking about my childhood of the Forties and Fifties, before Mom could buy already cleaned chickens from farm wives and put them in the freezer and long before the watery supermarket freezer fiction.
I loved picnics then whereas, oddly, today I hate picnics, convenience food out of cardboard buckets in unpleasant weather with too many allergies and insects. I am a major attraction to insects from chiggers to mosquitoes. And the rest has disappeared like so much else. The lowest of the Missouri River dams backed that river up, slowing the Niobrara's entrance into it, silting up both channels and drowning the 1856 Niobrara town site so that the new version had to move to the river bluff tops with its historic French-named cemetery, L'eau qui court ("Running Water," for the Niobrara), the original name of Knox County. The old park is drowned, the new one high up on the hilltops where Dad said there was a Ponca burial ground and too many rattlesnakes for hunting (creating the new park required much snake killing, unknown to city visitors). The state has a good-sized swimming pool and several modern cabins with air conditioning and microwaves, flocks of wild turkies, some deer, and the view is terrific across the confluence of the two rivers into South Dakota, past the spot where Lewis and Clark camped. I guess that's progress too.
About "Gramma" and "Grampa": the comic strip Pickles is the only one I've ever seen using those spellings, but that's actually how we pronounced those words, the -nd lost like the final -g in -ing words, so I thank Brian Crane for those and shall stick with them.
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