Sumner’s a sweet little town, and I am happy to be part of it.

It’s where I live with my wife, Ann, and our two dogs, Xunna, and Holly, our German Shepherd puppy.

But Auburn, the town that brought me up, has my heart, always will.

So many memories, wonderful, or tinged with pain and regret, crowd its streets, lawns, woodsy areas, and waters. Most of them tied to family and friends — some still living, others who have closed their eyes on this world.

Perhaps the earliest — I couldn’t have been more than three or four years old — and one of my deepest golden memories was White Lake, on the grounds of Miles Sand and Gravel’s pit on the southeast end of the city just down the road a spell from the former Person Lanes bowling alley.

My mom and dad used to take the growing Whale pod there. Dad would fork over a nickel or quarter to a guy in a small shack as we pulled in, and the man would beckon us onward — to a pocket-sized swimming hole with the most toe-and-foot-caressing sand-and-gravel bottom imaginable.

Wonderful it was, but Miles ended access to it after a drowning there in 1973. A few years ago, the Muckleshoot Tribe bought out Miles Sand and Gravel and reclaimed its tribal land. The Tribe’s plans for the site remain unknown.

But when I pass what is now the Tribe’s holding south of Highway 18 on my way to Flaming Geyser — dad always called it “Flaming Geezer,” and I still catch myself calling it that today — to points east like Enumclaw and Black Diamond, I turn my head for a moment to catch a glimpse of the mini-lake in the trees. I only wish kids and families could love and enjoy what we had then.

Here’s another memorable one, though for a different reason.

One fine summer day, friends Mark Maughan, my neighbor Tracy Young, Mark’s brother Eddie myself and others whom I have since forgotten decided we’d dig a deep hole in a corn field. Don’t know why it seemed a swell idea at the time, just one of those witless things kids who think they’ll live forever do, disregarding the risk. We kept at it, deepening and extending side chambers until the sun had gone down.

Every time I pass present-day Green River Mobile Estates on M Street Northeast, I remember our exploit. See, that’s where we done it, right there when it was that cornfield. And I think of Eddie, one of the most easy-going guys one could ever know — he had the admirable talent of tucking the outside of his ear inside his ear — who died of liver cancer several years ago.

We had a great time, but the dig was, in retrospect, a boneheaded thing to do.

Shuffling through my stack of oldies, I located another from a week or two later that same month, with the same two guys, Mark and Tracy, heading out to pick blackberries at a prodigious bush near the Burlington Northern Railroad tracks north of Auburn City Hall.

It wasn’t the destination, however, that sticks in the memory. It was that having just set out on our bicycles, I turned my head momentarily to say something to one of those guys, and wracked myself up on the front grill of the Tuckers’ parked car across the street. Bruised me up below the belt somewhat fiercely.

But my pals got a kick out of it. Especially you, Mark Maughan. You laughed. I remember that laugh.

“What I remember is purple,” Mark said last week during a chat on Facebook. “It’d be so funny if you wrote about that.”

So, Mark, this wince is for you. Thanks for bringing it up, dude!

Then there was the shameful, summer 1970 pig-out we 16th Street Northeast hoglets had at the expense of the then-newly built Bothell Bros. Chevrolet dealership. That day, the Brothers B. cooked up a mess of hot dogs for a customer promotion, but we, uninvited and no doubt, unwelcomed — moseyed in and greedily gobbled up those wieners.

I brought up that episode over lunch with my brother, Jack, the other day to check his memory. of it. He let go with one of his big laughs, but the slight drop of his head and the red that came across his face assured me he felt the same cringe I did. I think like with most shady or questionable things we all did, the ringleader was our big brother, Jim.

Then there was the neighborhood kids homeward trek from what I believe was a mud fight or some other excuse to coat ourselves with soil, singing with all my brothers and assorted friends as we went along a humorous song about the detergent that our mothers would use to make us presentable to the civilized world again.

“Comet, it makes your mouth turn green. Comet, it tastes like gasoline. Comet, it makes you vomit. So try some Comet, and vomit, today!”

Good times, good times.

But, the beating heart of my memories will always be the Green River.

Hour after hour, day after day, in summers of glory, swimming in its cool waters with friend Ken Murdock and occasional buddies, just south and around the bend from the footbridge, looking for crawdads, floating on inner tubes, and taking the most cooling dips just north of the footbridge at the end of the day with dad and little sister.

On one of those soul-restorative dips in the Green River, I remember chatting with a girl, a classmate named Jamie Martin, just north of the footbridge. I talked to her — always sweet and kind was Jamie — for about 10 minutes, she and her pretty blonde hair shining in the sun, smiling and laughing.

But that memory is tinged with sadness. Somebody killed Jamie between our sixth- and seventh-grade years. Her bones were found and identified a year or so later.

I know every generation laments what it had, and doubtless kids in years to come will do the sameI know what we had was great.

Here’s to you, Auburn. Thanks.

Robert Whale can be reached at robert.whale@auburn-reporter.com.