A hot week in Seattle. The family is bracing themselves for my certain meltdowns...
Stitching on cool greens helps. There was a phone call with my sister yesterday (who's in the east coast rain and humidity, but doesn't whine). Thinking of Dee's video, I started a conversation about the parks and rivers of our childhood summers.
Our favorite spot was a big park beside a the river. It had a wide dammed up area for smooth swimming, below it flowed into a rapid run ending in a deep swimming hole.
We usually went with our cousins. Eight kids- who spent hours swimming and riding inner tubes down the rapids, we'd catch crawdads under the rocks, filling up our sand pails to take to our parents, who would cook them up for lunch. The usual hot dogs, chips and potato salad rounded out the meal. The food would be scarfed down as fast as possible, because of the required (seemingly-never-ending) hour long wait before we could swim again (to avoid those mythological cramps). To pass the time we would explore the trails through the trees, or sometimes the dads would start up a make-shift softball game.
But really, it was about the water. As soon as the moms gave the go-ahead, we'd grab the tubes and run as fast as we could, splashing back into the cool green water, to float the rest of the day away.
