Rising fuel prices are sinking plans for summer vacations all across America.

Dare I say this is a good thing?

Perhaps this is the summer when children finally can reclaim their childhoods and drag their parents and grandparents right along with them.

So much good can come of these stay-at-home vacations. For starters, we can avoid the mind-splitting stress that wraps around our heads like a Craftsman bench vise whenever we lunge into action to stop life as we know it so that we can share crowded beaches, resorts and amusement parks with strangers who feel just as entitled as we do to a vacation without others in it.

No scrambling to suspend newspaper and mail deliveries, no fretting over who will feed the pets and water the plants. Neighborhood competitions will evaporate because nobody cares who can afford to travel the farthest or stay away the longest. The marital sport of blame over who is working harder to get ready to relax will seem as silly as badminton at the Olympics. (And yes, I know badminton really is an Olympic event, but c'mon. Even I can whack the birdie over the net. How Olympic can it be?)

Summer is the time of year when minds are supposed to wonder and wander, when we are allowed to go a little wild. When I was a kid, I used to marvel at the inverted V's of white flesh on the tops of my dusty feet after I kicked off my flip-flops. Those feet had been places.

Only in summer could I summon the courage to race my bike downhill without touching the handlebars and climb to the highest crook of the cherry tree out back so that I could read without interruption. My lifelong love for photography started in summer, too, after my father bought a new Kodak and gave me his old Brownie. I still have the photos from that first roll of film. They're square and faded and full of people willing to stop everything for a skinny kid with a camera. Such a summer thing to do.

We ate clover and called it sour grass and slid stems of Queen Anne's lace into our hair like hopeful brides. We rode our bikes to the beach on Lake Erie's shore and hunted for arrowheads along the Ashtabula River. One summer, Dad even saved Mom from drowning in the gulf.

"Dad sure must love Mom," my sister Leslie said later to no one in particular.

These are memories particular to me, which is part of the point of summer. Whose idea was it to herd everyone to the same beaches, camps and resorts and then call it summer?

I never went to summer camp, and we never took a weeklong family vacation anywhere. But I never felt robbed of a child's summer. And as I look back on summers with my own children, it's not memories of family trips that float to the surface, but rather those moments we could never schedule or plan.

I close my eyes and see my little girl catching fireflies with her friend, while I sit on the front stoop and take in the giggles. Or I see a much younger me aiming a soggy Koosh ball at a pool full of kids screaming, "Me! Me! Me!" I remember a long walk on a hot summer night when the 8-year-old boy in my life turned to me and said, "We were meant to find each other, you know."

And I still feel the dirt in my eyes from all those summers of coaching girls softball, when I would figure out the lineup at lunchtime and change into shorts and a T-shirt on the drive from work to the field. It was a lot of hassle, but I never felt happier than when a dozen girls were calling me "coach."

The rare beach house we rented and the 14-hour drives to get us there hold some sway in my memory, but the times we bloomed where we were planted have taken root somewhere deep inside me. And every time I try to get worked up about this summer's curtailed vacations, I can't help but see the possibilities in unscheduled laughter.

Gas prices might keep more of us at home?

One can only hope.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "… and His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.