When I was a young stripling between the ages of about ten and seventeen, when I joined the US Navy, I was being raised on a New York dairy farm. In summer our entire family spent countless hours processing grass into hay for winter feeding of our dairy cattle. This consisted mainly of mowing the grass, sun-drying it into storable hay, and then moving it from meadow to barn.
Day after day in summer we continued this tedious process. It often was hot, dirty, long days of hard labor. Nearly every evening we boys would go swimming in a neighbor’s gravel pit that had filled to a depth of six feet with surface water, when our day’s work was done. While working in the fields during the daytime we often daydreamed of our refreshing dip in the cooler evening hours after the day’s milking was completed. Anticipation may have been as fulfilling as actual fact.
As well as the swimming, I nearly always also had the pleasure of meeting a local girl just my age that happened to live very near the old swimming hole. I cannot deny that more than half the pleasure involved had more to do with Kathy than it did with swimming. I was only beginning to understand the pleasure of female company.
Today, fifty-seven years after I left the farm to enter the Navy, I drove to the old gravel pit to see for myself what remained of my memories of the good times there. What used to be an acre or so of gravel and sand with the water pool in the center is now a wooded, brushy area with a stagnant pool filled with algae, and clutter of all sorts. Had I not known the difference it would be hard to convince me anyone had ever used that for swimming.
As I sat in my pickup today staring at the stagnant pool, remembering what it was like oh so many years ago, it once more reminded me you can never go back. Nevermore will it ever be like it was when you were there the first time.
Whatever happened to you Kathy P.?
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