Remember them? Remember our childhood summers? We woke in our beds those mornings to see the sun already pooling like melted butter on the floorboards.

We threw on the clothes nearest at hand and shot into the bathroom to pay quick homage to soap and toothpaste, then ran into the kitchen for a quick breakfast — where we would down whole cups of cold, cold milk.

The milk came in bottles topped with funny little paper shower caps, remember? And they clinked as they jiggled in the milkman's metal rack.

Our cream came in bottles, too, only the bottles were shorter and fatter.

There was no such thing as skim or low-fat milk then, unless our mothers got the unhomogenized kind and separated the cream out themselves. My family fed some 75 people a day come summer, so our milk came in those wonderful cool silver cans as tall as a grown man's knee. Even now I can picture the anticipation I felt spooning the heavy cream off the top to eat with my morning corn flakes.

Summoning us to those kitchens were wonderful aromas: Of dark coffee perked in those blue-speckled pots right there on the burner. Of bacon spitting away in heavy iron skillets, of eggs frying to a lacy-edged perfection beside them. Of toast cooked in the oven before being slathered with butter and piled high on the platter.

Who didn't eat a breakfast of eggs and bacon, of milk, butter and toast and wash it all down with a small, slender glass of fresh-squeezed juice?

Every kitchen had a hand-operated

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juicer, and near it the small pale oranges lined up to meet their next day's fate. Bowls of small apples stood on the counter also, equally small because all fruits were small in that era before science got hold of them.

We were kids, of course, and kids don't care that much about a kitchen, but if we had to we could tell a Martian what a kitchen usually came with.

It came with a meat grinder and a potato peeler.

A double boiler and a bean pot.

A flour-sifter and a rolling pin.

An eggbeater and some dented tin cookie cutters.

And sometimes, set in the top of one section of the old wooden counter, a cool slab of sure-enough marble to receive the weekly stretch of pie dough.

I can still see my childhood kitchen as I streaked through it and out the door to run past the wash hanging on the clothesline; to run clear through the wash for the simple fun of getting spanked by the bed sheets, clean and fragrant.

And once out there, we simply played: At tag and hide-and-seek. At Simon Says and Run Sheep Run. We built clubhouses in the trees and make-believe beaver dams in streams and ditches.

We came home when the grownups called us and they didn't call on cell phones.

We came when they called, but not until then.

For we were young and we loved our freedom, which we believed would last forever, as we believed that summer would come each year with fresh new batches of fun and adventure.

Even now, when summer comes, we pray the old prayer. Slow down, we plead as we have always done, but now we add a new coda: Pick us up, we silently pray, though we know that we ask the impossible.

Bend and scoop us up and set us down once more in the kitchens of our childhood; in the simple spare bedrooms of our youth where a warming sun was all that woke us.

Write Terry Marotta at tmarotta@comcast.net or PO Box 270, Winchester MA 01890.