Memories of Vacations

Strange how memories can turn disasters into laughter. One year most of my family went to a small nearby lake for a week. No one told us not to drink the water.

Now that you have that image fully in your mind.......we did eventually get the message and began to boil all our drinking water. And as a young teenager I learned to like coffee.

The cabin came with a rowboat. Being that my much younger sister had never experienced the water-related problems and was cheerfully annoying the heck out of me, I spent quite a bit of time alone on the lake in that rowboat. The sky was pale blue. The lake was just slightly dusted with wind-made waves. The sounds were faint laughter and birds. No photograph could ever capture the peace and magic of being on that lake.

All things come to and end and I had to row for shore every day in time to get dinner prepared. But the early afternoons were worth any price I could imagine.

Amusingly, on the way to the lake my sister and I were discovered to have a bag of crab apples hidden in the car. Our mother made us toss each one out the window because crab apples would make us ill.

Then she gave us bad well-water.

(hearty laughing now)