Out of Necessity

I look over at him--hat backwards, mouth set in a tight, closed-lip grin, hunkered down behind the "windshield"-"so that my eyelashes don't flap in the wind", he says-- and I laugh out loud.

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We were going to get ice.

I climbed over in the boat, and as my brother untied from the pier, the rope came loose.

I was floating away...

He looks at the rope hanging in his hand. "Well, Kimmie... You ready to learn how to drive a boat?" "Ready or not!" I yelled back.

When someone asked if he thought I could do it, he responded, "She's got no choice."

He talked--or rather hollered--me through it, I made it safely back to the pier.

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It's been years since I've been on the lake, and I have the ghostly white legs to prove it, but as we passed by my great aunt's camp-the old rickety pier with the faded blue slide-I was taken back to all the summers we spent there.

I was young--I can't even venture to guess an age--and if I got into the water, I had on my ever-faithful floaties. This also meant than an adult had to be in the water with me...so when they tired of swimming, out I came, and I was put in charge of keeping the slide wet so the other kids didn't stick to it on the way down.

I'd set to work--filling a pitcher from the lake, climbing the slide, pouring the water down the slide, dismount and repeat.

I'm not sure what I was thinking the day that I climbed the slide, poured the water, and followed--belly side to the slide--down into the lake.  No floaties.

I'm pretty sure, however, that was the day I learned how to swim...at least enough to keep my head above water.

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I flash on these memories in the seconds it takes for the boat to get far enough away that the pier blends into so many others-and I couldn't help but smile as I watched the lake fly by through wind-blown eyelashes.