Water, Water, Everywhere.

I am happiest when I'm near water, but I'm ecstatic when that water is contained within a lake. There is something about being from Minnesota that only my friends who grew up near a lake (or a few steps away from a lake) can understand. It's almost impossible to put it into words.

But today, on an early Saturday morning, I'm going to try.

There's a line in my poem, "Bijou," that reads: "I learned to swim among Ironwood and Maple." It's my favorite line. It makes me think of the trees being witnesses to everything that happened in and on and by the lake. And there was plenty. I learned how to swim among Ironwood and Maple. Learned how to hold my breath, tread water, float, keep my three obnoxious brothers from drowning me. I learned how to sit on the bottom of the lake with my friends and talk without swallowing the entire lake. Learned how to listen through the gurgles to make out silly words. Sometimes we would build forts under the canoe, or swim under the raft by the Iversons, using the headspace of air to spill our deepest secrets. I learned how to dive off of a dock, learned how to avoid leaches and bullhead's whiskers. I learned how to waterski behind a boat whose motor was so small I'm surprised it could even lift us up. I fished and cleaned the fish I caught with worms we would dig up in the moist hills around the lake.

There were days in the summer that my friends and I wouldn't leave the lake even to eat lunch. We'd forget about dinner, choosing to have sandwiches brought to us on the deck so we wouldn't have to change out of our suits. I considered swimming in the lakes, when I was a child, a bath. Never worried about my hair, or skin, or the sun's rays beaming down on us for hours. If you lived on a lake, you had several swimsuits, so you might have a dry one to change into if you were somehow convinced to leave the lake to go to church or to town for some errand or if a storm was rolling through. Putting on a wet swim suit, however, wasn't the worst thing that could happen to you. 

A few years ago, I went home and swam. I woke up in the early morning, put on my swimsuit, ran down the steps of my parent's new home by a lake I was not familiar with, jumped in -- gasping a little bit at the feeling of cool hitting my body all at once, then my insides practically exploding at the feeling of the water curling its way around my outside and insides so perfectly, then immediately laid back and floated -- looked up at the sky and watched the clouds roll by. I didn't notice time passing, or my father coming to the dock to see if I remembered how to swim, or even the fact that water was rushing into my ear canal where it would later nourish and house bacteria giving me one of the worst cases of water ear and inner ear infections I had ever had in my life. In both ears.

But I would do it again. And will in about eighteen days, I imagine. This time with earplugs.

And a prescription of penicillin just in case.