I finally learned to swim when I was eleven years old, at Camp Pokanoka, the Trailways Girl Scout Camp in Ottawa, IL. I was home for a week then our family took off for Chalet on the Lake in Stevensville, Michigan.
Chalet on the Lake is a beautiful, family-friendly resort with A-frame, duplex lodgings on Lake Michigan. The resort offered two pools of varying depths. The shallow one had a slide; the deeper one, a diving board, where I happily practiced my newly acquired swimming and diving skills. The following year, we rented a Minnesota cabin and enjoyed boating and fishing along with lake swimming and spectacular, lake-front sunsets. To this day, I can’t conjure a sunset without also seeing a lake.
Through the years, my family twice returned to Chalet on the Lake, the last time with my husband and four-month old son. I had thought it heralded the beginning of water-filled summers with my new family. Instead, it marked the end of them. My husband is deathly afraid of water. I assumed it was a passing phase and that, in time, he would get over it, but stark reality was much crueler. Fortunately, I didn’t know about the dry future that magical summer when I finally learned to swim.
Once we moved to New Lenox in the fall of 1974, our beach days ended, for the new home contained a five-foot pool in the backyard. Swimming now became a daily occurrence. Eighteen months later and one week before our New York cousins came to visit, we awoke to find that the back wall of the pool had collapsed in the night and spilled its water into the neighbors’ yard behind us. We replaced it, but our enjoyment of it ebbed, for it took weeks for the water to lose its "straight from the hose" chill.
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