In all those seventy-three sea and lakeside summers, those long idyllic sun-filled days with fat fluffs of white sailing high to cast now-and-again shade, or those humid, hazy days when the whine of mosquitoes filled her ears and no-seem-‘ems swarmed her damp body, she never learned to swim. Not really. Not beyond a doggy paddle.
She loved that Maine’s frigid ocean allowed her to forego a plunge. No one badgered her to “at least dip your feet and splash some water to cool down a bit.” No one demanded she wade in, struggle in the briny undertow, or sink into the muck beneath. She felt no urge to join her shrieking peers who rushed into its biting swirls to emerge blue and chattering only to splash back again and again. She sat stoic and silent amid the bugs, splattering her pages with their smashed bodies as she read. Or she watched the Atlantic glisten and whisper across the stony beach and dash itself into froth around the boulders to leave crusts along the shoreline.
Perhaps it was because of her season of summer camp, when her parents left her despite the whooping cough. That summer she was seven, and the counselors forced her to swim every day among the five-year-olds, the youngest campers, the ones everyone except her called the babies. Most swam no better than she, and they made fun of her, these babies. They called her “scaredy cat” because she refused to put her face in the water. She flailed and splashed, holding her head rigidly above the water line but failing to keep water out of her eyes. They followed her back to the cabins, stumbling, jerking their arms about and laughing, calling her “the spaz.”
She hated them. She hated camp.
She never learned to swim any better, not ever.
Image by Pixels.
Ruminations 