Summer is coming, can you feel it? Remember summer? Weddings and graduations, backyard parties with borrowed white chairs and deviled eggs in white cups? Remember summer?

It’s time to pull out all of those summer dresses and white jackets, and maybe the old white tablecloth for the outdoor table. So it’s down to Grondin’s Dry Cleaners.

Wait! It’s closed? Say what? Grondin’s Dry Cleaners is closed? Is it a holiday? Who died? Why is no one upset?

You haven’t been back since you graduated from Colby years ago, and you’re looking for Sterns and The Last Unicorn and you’re wondering why I’m upset? Well, here’s some local history to bring you up to date.

“Grondin’s Certified Cleaners — also doing business as A.J.M.A., Inc. and ‘The Cleaners,’ is a wholesale and retail dry cleaning service.”

The business, we learn, was established in 1927 and incorporated in 1984 in Maine, and is now owned by Mr. Philip Roy, who is president, and Mr. Peter Roy, who is vice president. One of them has bees and makes honey. I hope I got that right. They’re nice guys and I don’t want to upset them.

My wife, Katherine Joly, and the Joly family have used Grondin’s Certified Cleaners since 1927. I read that they have 14 employees. The only one at the counter to greet me has been a sweet lady named Elaine, and someone invisible making noise in the dark back.

Wait! I’ve been told that a deal has been made and soon the quiet racks will move again, breathing life into the counter and making productive noise in the back. Hurrah!

While we wait, let me share my memories of the dry cleaning business. David Carr’s Cleaners on Michigan Avenue in my St. Louis neighborhood was a busy place that laundered shirts and dry-cleaned almost everything including American flags, prom dresses and tuxes for us all.

David’s son, Paddy, and our gang would sometimes have sleepovers in the store’s basement, where clothes-in-waiting were hung. We enjoyed sharing ghost stories by flashlight while listening to the whispers of hundreds of white bags hanging overhead.

For years, dozens of senior prom dresses and tuxes hung there like ghosts, along with scary overcoats and uniforms, and — are you ready for this? — the always-black suits and gowns of the “recently deceased” that were cleaned before, before adorning the bodies. Paddy shared that ghost story, and I still get the same shivers remembering it. The suits and dresses, Paddy told us, had to be cleaned before the burial mass. We actually asked Father Keating to verify that as he put his golf clubs into his car. “Would you want Jesus to see you in a soiled suit?” he whispered.

Grondin’s. Well. you know where it is. You could find it with your eyes closed. Even with the paint peeling off the sign out front and the signs in the windows, you could find it. It was Oz with clean clothes. Your grandma will tell you how in 1927 she brought her bedspreads to Grondin’s, even the one her grandma gave her on her wedding day.  You saw it. It was the one with the different patches that she sewed together. It was a work of art, and you couldn’t just throw it in the washing machine.

So Grondin’s is closed for now. Oh! There are plenty of dry cleaners in Maine, just not here in Waterville or Winslow. There are several in Portland of course. Portland is a big town where folks still wear tuxes and ballgowns at weddings … and dark suits at funerals.

Oh! There is a big one in Naples, Florida, the tiny town where your grandparents go in the winter. I’m told that there are two dry cleaners open in Freeport: Lighthouse Laundry and Park Street Laundromat & Dry Cleaners. Is that true?

What’s that? Your daughter is getting married in June and wants to wear your wedding gown? Remember how that little kid spilled grape punch on it? Dig it out. Grondin’s may be back.

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.