Last week's prompt was 'swimming'. In response,  I dusted off this story that I wrote a while ago in our memoir group.

Summer Times


We pulled on sweatshirts over our pajamas, hopping across the cold linoleum to watch tv while we ate breakfast. The porch was enclosed, but there was no heat anywhere in the bungalow. By around 11 AM, the sun had began to pour in through the windows. We shed layers as mom determined it was a beach day. Most were. We were at our country house for the summer with our mother. Dad came up from the city on weekends.
It took a while for us to get ready. We struggled into our damp bathing suits that had spent the night on the clothesline. We put our beach jackets over them while Mom made our sandwiches, usually canned tuna, to eat on the beach.

Mom didn’t drive so we walked down the hills to get to the beach. Sometimes we would see Sadie. She was a friend of Aunt Esther’s and had a summer cottage that we passed along the way. I remember Sadie wore a black bathing suit even when gardening, and had a deep reddish tan that seemed permanent. She had a son named Junior that I had a crush on. His skin matched his mother’s with a tan the same color, and a black bathing suit, too. Mom almost always stopped to talk and my sister and I would start whining after what seemed like forever. “Let’s go, you can talk to her on the beach,” we said, tugging on mom’s white  terry jacket. 

Our neighbor, Marie Reina sold beach passes and church raffle tickets from her ‘office’ near the gate. She kindly stashed my mother’s chair so we didn’t have to carry it down. We weren’t supposed to tell anyone.

We set up our blanket, putting shoes on each corner to hold it down. Then one of us had to go to the office and get Mom’s chair. Marie would be sitting inside the little hut. The top half of the door was open, her cigarette dangled from the side if her mouth, one eye  squinting from the smoke. She could see us coming and handed the chair over the closed bottom half of the door.

Mom put her chair in the water at the edge of the lake so she could watch us. She never came in. Her standard line when asked was that she couldn’t get her bathing suit wet. She never elaborated as to why it was so. When she told her little joke, people laughed politely. Years later, we found out she didn’t know how to swim.
We sat on the blanket to eat our lunch. It had been sitting in a paper bag under a beach towel to protect it from the sun. By the time we ate our sandwiches the white bread was nice and gummy. 

There was a bus that left about once an hour that went up to the hills and could let us off right in front of our house. Very often though, mom wanted to stay later than the last bus, but only if someone would drive us home. Walking down was one thing, but up was pretty tough. Mom was pretty good at finding rides, though not everyone was a good driver. Sometimes we were lucky to get home safely.