2002-08-28 - 11:37 p.m.
This is an entry for the Random Acts of Journaling Collaborative.
Question: What is your favorite summer memory?
Even as a kid, the end of summer was always a time that made me feel like I was waiting. Waiting for the heat to break, waiting for school to start, waiting for something to change. Summers were long and hot and air conditioning was still considered a rare and expensive luxury item....one my parents didn't indulge in. Lying on the floor in front of the fan was the only way to keep cool, and by late summer I had read every book in the house from that spot. Told to play outside, I could only make a desultory tour of the yard, dragging my feet, now toughened from a barefoot summer, through the dry grass.
The greatest of all possible events on an August afternoon was a chance to go swimming. Sometimes I think Mom got tired of our whining, or maybe she was just as anxious to go and sit in the shade by the lake as we were to swim. We would each roll our swimsuit into an old bath towel, and pile into the car and she would drive us the few miles to the old railroad lake at Dismal Seepage where there was a swimming area.
Two long white-washed bath houses, one for men and one for women, extended on either side of a wooden plank walkway. Inside it was always a little dim, and the narrow changing stalls offered only skimpy faded curtains for privacy. So we changed as fast as we could, leaving t-shirts, shorts and towels on the bench.
And then we ran....bare feet pounding on the wet wooden planks, out to the catwalk that led into the water. I liked to plunge right into the cool water, to get the shock part over with. I would come up gasping and shrieking, but in a few minutes the water didn't seem cold at all. Sometimes there were other kids there I knew and I would get involved in some sort of manic game: pushing each other off of an inner tube, batting at a ball, splash fights. Even if nobody remotely close to my age was there, I was still in constant motion, practicing floats and flips and summersaults...."cannonballing" anyone who wasn't already wet... diving down to explore the bottom.
I remember discovering the physics of water: how you can't run, even in shallow water, but you can pick up something heavy....how people float, and why water doesn't go up your nose unless you turn upside down. And feeling the life of the lake, like some friendly but slightly sinister presence, not to be trusted. The weeds curled around our feet if we ventured out of the swimming area, and we tried not to think about what was down there, out of sight.
We bigger kids could "swim out to the dock"... paddle across a short stretch of open water out to a raised platform that supported a diving board. And I was brave enough to jump off the diving board, although I never really learned to dive. I could do a good forward flip off the platform though, and spent one summer (my thirteenth, I think it was) practicing it endlessly.
And this is what I most remember: Taking a couple of steps for momentum, hands over my head, I snap my body forward and fling myself off the platform. In a moment of thrilling dizziness, I roll, heels over head, into to air. Hitting the water stings my back, and then I sink down into the cold depths for just a moment before I bob back up to the surface. Gasping for breath, exhilirated. Pulling myself out of the water to climb up the ladder, I am strong and agile, climbing quickly and gracefully. I love water, I belong in the water. I am so completely happy with every sensation of my body.
I remember having so much energy, never wanting to stop, even when my Mother is calling and the sun is starting to go down. Just wanting to do it one more time...watch me.... just one more time. And then....I am so tired on the way home that even the air feels soft, and kind of pillowy. We drive home slowly, along the dusty country roads, listening to the cicadas and crickets. Sitting in the backseat of the car, my stringy hair smelling like lake water, my skin hot from too much sun, I feel a little different somehow, as though I had been someone else for a while. Sometimes, just to make it perfect, we go get an ice cream cone at the Dairy Queen.
It was the last summer before I got boobs and periods and became completely self-conscious about how I looked in a swimming suit, and who was there to see me. And probably the last time I felt completely comfortable in my own skin, before becomming conscious of the body as a commodity, something to be judged. I still had not stumbled into all the cultural expectations that hobble females, that make us think that the way we look is more important than what we do, or how we feel. I went to that lake many more times, and swam and even did a few more flips, but I never did it without a sense of self-consciousness.
I may have had some sense of the changes to come, in that last summer, but I wasn't able to think about it yet. I just wanted to do flips off the dock. Really good flips.
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