“The pond beckons….”

My cousin Kelli wrote that of Facebook this morning. It sure is a pond beckons kind of day shaping up, temps in the 90’s and muggy. I sure wish a pond could beckon me and I could answer it, but nope, work won’t let me heed the call.
The pond she refers to is at her father’s place, a wonderful location on a hill just above (literally) the farm where I grew up. It’s useable for swimming, and also works for a short rather circular boat ride and some fishing. It’s also a bit of sadness for me; when they dug the test holes to decide where the pond should be, one of my dogs fell into one and drowned.
But this is about ponds beckoning. Ponds, and creeks. We did have a pond on the farm, but it never amounted to much, it never got deep enough to swim in because very soon after it was made, the dam got a large hole that never did get repaired. It was shallow, we could wade in it, and my father took the guide boat out on it sometimes, guide boats being especially made to work in very shallow water – I was in it with him once and he was trying to see how shallow we could go, and we were in water only a couple of inches deep when he asked me ‘did you ever walk home from a boat ride?’ We didn’t have to, he rowed/poled until deeper water and we rowed back.
Our ‘swimming holes’ were in the creek, and I think that anyone who has never swum in a lazy country creek has lacked something in their life. There were two, ‘Raup’s’ and ‘Wagner’s’, named for the property owners where the lanes went down to the swimming hole. Wagner’s was more popular, because there were rocks to swim to and sit on and jump off of. Raup’s I think might have been a larger area, and deeper.
We’d work in the hayfield or doing other chores, and then either in the late afternoon, or early evening after the cows were milked, we’d all climb into the pick-up (usually there were a few cousins around to join in) and go swimming. Oh, that first jump into the water was so wonderful! Whether you grabbed the rope and swung out and launched yourself into the deep water, or ran in or waded and then let yourself sink down, it was the best feeling ever!
We’d have swimming races, or see who could stay under the longest, or who could dive to the bottom in the deeper places. Or we’d just swim to the rocks and lay on them in the sun – or push each other off, or sit on the bank and dare each other to try different stunts.
Once, after a day of hard rain storms, a neighbor took us down, but the creek was running so high and fast he wouldn’t let us go in. He did, and tried to swim against the current, he was a large, strong man, and he couldn’t go forward; that was a lesson in the power of water. And one night, my father and mother brought my sister and I down after dark and we all went skinny dipping. My sister and I giggled a lot.
A few times we rode the horses down there, and took them into the water. I think that old guy of mine tried to roll over in it once, if I recall correctly, with me on him, of course. And I think that was the same day that I stepped on a broken jar top and cut my foot quite deeply and badly. We tied a bandana around it and I kept on swimming, because why let a little thing like that stop the fun? I still have that scar.
I can still feel the water flowing around me and feel the sun. Swimming pools are fine, but they can’t match the feel of the pond or creek that beckons.