Unofficially, it is now officially summer — that post-Memorial Day stretch of sunshine, sweat, and sweetness so different from the rest of the year, and so much more memorable.

From that first Popsicle that melts off its stick to that first crush who teaches you to dance, the lessons are wide-ranging, and seared in the heart. Everything I needed to know I learned during the summer. As did everyone else below:

WHAT A REAL CARE PACKAGE IS:

“I went to a camp where most kids’ parents were divorced,” a non-profit consultant, Mandy Hass, recalls. “The divorced parents competed for their kids’ affection, each arriving on his or her negotiated day toting gobs of candy and gifts. I was already feeling more than a little jealous by late on the last day of the second weekend when my parents, who were not divorced, still hadn’t arrived.

“I was waiting — forgotten? — at the dirt road camp entrance, and finally our family station wagon rumbled up,” she says. “Out came our old plaid picnic blanket, a Thermos of piping hot Campbell’s chicken noodle soup, PBJ on Wonder Bread, and Wise Potato Chips. Same meal I’d stubbornly insisted on eating on every family car trip of my whole young life, but it had never tasted so good. I took turns hugging each of my parents between bites.”

That night, as her bunkmates one-upped each other with dual-parent candy, Mandy couldn’t compete. “But somehow I knew that they probably would have traded all their candy for what I had.”

WHAT APPEARS TO BE A CURSE, MAY BE A BLESSING:

As he sat on a stoop with Clyde, his English setter who was eating a hot dog, 7-year-old Dan Collins patted the pooch’s head. Bad move.

Clyde lunged. Clyde bit. Clyde gnawed. “Things went fuzzy,” Mr. Collins, a Baltimore native, said. After that, “I received a free ambulance ride and remember wondering, ‘Why don’t I feel any pain?’ They told me I was in shock and I kept thinking to myself: ‘Thank God for shock. I LIKE SHOCK.'”

Up till then, Mr. Collins had been an active kid, running around all summer. “After Clyde, I stopped going outdoors and began cultivating a rich inner life — and rich diet. I was fast becoming an after school special.” At the same time his grades leapt from B’s and C’s to A’s and his fate was sealed. “I became a writer.”

Sometimes man’s best friend works in mysterious ways.

GET BACK UP AND KICK THAT BALL:

As a child at day camp, Russell Schaffer had one goal: “I always wanted to be ‘Camper of the Week,” the 31-year-old said. “So there I am, every week, being very, very good. Kicking that kickball into that field, even doing drama and singing. And week after week, I didn’t get it. But I always had my hopes up.

“Then,” his voice catches a bit, “there we are on a Friday afternoon and we have our ice cream sandwiches and they’re announcing, ‘The Camper of The Week is Russell — ‘ and I jump up and run on stage, I’m so excited!”

That’s when he learned there were actually two Russells at camp, and only one was a winner.

“I had my dignity,” he says. “I held my tears on stage. But the minute I got back to the house, it was a waterfall. My mother was comforting me, but I was sad. Very sad. I felt like Charlie Brown with the football.”

Come Monday, just like Charlie Brown, he returned to camp. “I was playing kickball and, like, across the field I see my mom and she’s talking to the camp director. I don’t know what they talked about, but guess who won Camper of The Week next Friday?”

And guess who, 20 something years later, still insists she was only talking about the bus schedule?

STOP AND SMELL THE BACK YARD:

“At night,” mother-of-two Marla Sherman recalled expansively, “my parents would let loose and sit around a picnic table in the yard and my mom would come out with ice coffee and Entenmann’s cake and the guys were drinking beer and we’d taste the beer.”

That’s it. Nothing big or traumatic. “Just sitting in the yard, sweating but loving it, and getting to sip their sweet ice coffee.” That’s what she remembers.

This past year, her dad died. But not the memory of sitting outside with him as the sun went down and the cake came out.

LET TIME GO AND IT COMES BACK TO YOU:

“We used to go to this place in Vermont from ages, I guess, 3 to 9,” a Fordham English professor, Lenny Cassuto, said. “The best part was that after it rained — this was in a pine forest — the salamanders would come out and I would always go out and bring a bowlful of them back and let them walk across the table. They looked so cute and their eyes had a gold pupil against a black background and they’d move both of their right legs forward and then their left legs, so they sort of waddled.”

Then the cabins were sold, his parents hated the new owners, and that was that. Until a few years ago.

As his parents shopped in a nearby outlet, they learned that the cabins were still around, under new ownership. They rented one for themselves, and separate ones for Mr. Cassuto, his brother — and the grandkids.

“There’s an E.B. White essay, ‘Once More To The Lake,’ where he takes his son to the lake that he used to summer at as a kid, and watched his son do all the things he did and I basically lived that essay,” Mr. Cassuto said. His daughter collected salamanders and watched them waddle, “and I wrote something unusually maudlin in the cabins’ guest book.”

The sweetness of summer is fleeting. Enjoy it while you’ve got it.

Happy summer.

To share your summer memory, send an e-mail to sunsummermemories@gmail.com.