Swimming in the dark golden green memories

I remember long, hot summer days and hanging out with my brother in the countryside.

We were city people but spent summers in the country. Sometimes we were taken to our family cottage which although it had no running water or electricity, was staying in comfort compared to the other option, the ‘farm’.

The farm was an old derelict house on a field beside a highway. Porcupines thought it was their house. We slept on mattresses on the floor upstairs. Lots of flies and mosquitoes made their way in and mice ate our soap. Our parents worked on the house while my brother and I, the youngest, were told to go out and play.

They must have been dreaming of living there. There must have been dreams.

My brother and I had various ideas for play. One fun thing to do was play with mud in the cool shade of the porch but as we got older and braver we made out way into the outside world.

Sometimes we would go for a bike ride to the nearest town for ice cream. This was an exhausting marathon on our crappy bikes with slightly flat tires and by the time we got back the cooling ice cream had faded in our memory and we were sweaty and covered in dust.

Other times we would cross the small highway and ride our broken down bikes down a rocky old lumber road as fast as we could, bumping and flying over rocks or we would explore the bridge and what was under it (a large turtle once).

Or we would play in our ‘forts’. We had a few different ones and could identify them by name, though I can’t remember the names now. Maybe it will come back to me.

One fort was in among some pine trees where we could sit on the needles in a soft and scented patch of forest and look over the highway. Another fort was on the hill beside the house, a good hill, good enough to toboggan on in the winter when the house was heated by a smoky wood furnace down in the sandy cellar.

The fort on the hill was the epitome of a child’s fort, entirely built in our minds. We thought of it as a house but it was only three logs pulled up behind a large rock to form a square shape with the back of the rock as one of the founding walls of our house.

The large rock was a ‘look out’ and acted as our second floor. The logs that we had dragged there formed the base off the house, the blueprint for where we would one day put the walls. If we found an old rusty teapot or cups, they ended up in my kitchen, in this house.

We might have called it the Rock Fort. It was a home we dreamed up.

We also had a pine tree fort. If we went to the end of the field, passing the shack that housed the natural spring that we were not to play in, and continued down to the creek, there was a large pine tree, our pine tree fort.

Climbing into that tree we could settle onto its large branches and talk and eat snacks. It was another place to be. We might have made a fort out of the light blue Volkswagen Beetle abandoned at the bottom of the field, but it was clearly being lived in by animals. I believed rabbits lived there.

‘Let’s go pick strawberries. But they are so tiny. But so sweet. Take a bucket. And snacks. And then we will go to our forts’.

As the family slowly dissolved from a nuclear unit to a broken necklace of spirts rolling in all directions, my dad took over the ‘farm’ and my mom got the house in the city. They put the cottage in all our names thereby causing havoc and pain later in life and eventually my play, Wrack and Ruin.

But when we were still a family we were all in it together. In the hot summers my mom would be out in the sun working in the garden. My dad would be talking to himself as he hammered something or headed to get tools.

Sometimes an older sibling would take us to the beaver pond to swim. The rushing creek had a bend in it and there was a deep pool there, created by the beavers, that was dark and cold. The walk across the field seemed long and too hot but once we were there, I hesitated. We were swimming in the beaver’s home, and my sister saw him once.

We slipped into the water off a large fallen tree. I swam carefully, cautiously. One time I slipped backwards off the inner tube I was floating on and I was so surprised I didn’t have time to close my eyes. I saw green plants and gold shafts of light and bubbles before I emerged gasping and choking.

When I think of my brother I think of those idyllic summers full of time and space and the cosmic drone of heat bugs. It was safe and we were free.