Summer vacations swimming at the mill pond in Daydreaming on the Porch

What is memory
But the seine net of experience.
The trawler of desire
For a past that was better
Than now.
A re-created vision
Of a more abundant life
When memories are good
And finely tuned
To filter out all those
Messy, unpleasant facts of life.

I want to record some thoughts I’ve been mulling over lately. They deal with the subject of memory. I’ve been thinking a lot about that word and all that it means. It is freighted with so many layers and contexts of meaning. It seems that now when I am thinking about my past, I can remember only what I consciously try to piece together from some fragment in that past that enters my mind.

It occurs to me that to really recall an event or time in the past, I have to conjure up the smells, the tastes, and the physical settings as concretely as I can. But they are mainly fragments and are easily lost. But, if I start to write about them, as I am here, more fragments of memories come up from I don’t know where, and I am able to begin re-creating the memory in a way that I feel confident is an accurate picture of the event or time out of which the memory arose. Writing about it is, in a sense, reliving it. Then, if I choose to do so, I begin the process of trying to recall emotional states of times in the past, or view them somewhat analytically for meaning to me in the present. Without this process that I gradually build upon, the memories remain static, unmemorable. I want to try to understand why I remember what I do.

Years ago, when I was around 9 or 10, we spent our summer vacations in Sumter South Carolina where my mother grew up. It was here that longing for escape from the seemingly interminable school year was realized, and I could go swimming in a mill pond just outside of town. I remember how the water smelled. It was a fresh and earthy smell. The water is that backed up behind the dam had come from blackwater streams and swamps, darkened by tannin from tree leaves falling into the water. There was a stationary platform in the pond just behind the shallow section, no even 50 yards from the grassy edge. Here, my brother and I would swim out and dive into the deep, cool water. I wouldn’t go too far down because the deeper I dove, the colder and darker the water became, and there seem to us no bottom to it at all.

After a morning of swimming at the mill pond, my father, brother and I would head home to my aunt’s place, and head for the dining table in the kitchen filled with patters and bowls of the most delicious southern food: fried bream, rice and gravy, biscuits, black-eyed peas, fresh sliced tomatoes, pole beans with fat back, corn on the cob, and iced tea. I ate until I couldn’t possibly hold any more.

That was the tradition in those days of summer vacation: swim at the pond, maybe go fishing later in the afternoon, or go to the dime stores downtown. Just have fun doing things we could never do at home in New Orleans. That is why those memories are so deeply etched in my mind. Each new school year, filled with worries and anxieties, I’d return in my memories to the summer just passed. By that time in September, and more so in later years, those vacations assumed the rosiest of glows. They became golden ages in my young life. I would daydream about the jukebox on the dance stand by the shore of the pond and hear the the old Fats Domino tunes “Blueberry Hill” and “Walking to New Orleans.” I’d yearn to be back there as I sat daydreaming at my school desk because it seemed to me, several months later, that the perfect summer vacation in July was a very long time ago.

Today, the pond is still there, the cypress trees beautiful around the perimeter and back toward where the feeder creek builds up behind the dam. Many many years ago there used to be a gristmill on the site, but that has long since disappeared. A four-lane highway now crosses right next to where we used to go swimming, and the small beach is closed to the public. People still fish on the banks, but it is a different place.

When I drive across the pond, I often find myself looking to the side to where the shallow water begins, and we used to wade as children out to the floating platform. I look out my car window at the dark water, and it still looks clean and fresh and inviting, and I wonder what it would feel like now to dive down into the depths and come up, stroking hard to clear the surface and hauling myself up onto a now nonexistent platform, breathless from exertion but exhilarated and happy.