I’m reading a book for my Master Gardeners’ Book Club in November and there was the most wonderful chapter about water and it got me thinking about how water has played such a role in my life.  I’ve never been without water but when we lived in Dayton, Ohio I wasn’t thrilled with the taste of the water and I often carried water from my aunt’s home in Germantown, Ohio.

My first love of water was as a child.  My dad was a fisherman and we would pack up on a weekend and go to Twin Creek which was also in Germantown. Us kids would play in the water and have a rip-roaring time and my dad would take off away from us to fish.  We would skate rocks over the creek and catch crawdads. I learned to swim at Twin Creek and enjoyed many fun days swimming there and at the local swimming pool in Chautauqua.

Our house had a well which provided us with drinking water.  I remember waking up in the middle of hot summer nights and drinking from my hand the ice-cold water from the bathroom tap.  My mother would get up to check on me and I would be close to drowning in the refreshingly cold tap water.

On occasion my parents would allow me to hook up the sprinkle and run through it.  Why is it that you know how cold that rush is going to be but you persist in running in and out of it? Years later as an adult I ran through a sprinkler in a stranger’s yard while on tour with the marching band in Minnesota.  It was so darn hot, and I really didn’t care that I was soaking wet.  This was my only wet t-shirt episode.

After the hubster and I married he was my brother’s fishing partner.  They fished Twin Creek.  We had small mouth or rock bass for breakfast almost every weekend morning.

In my third year at college the hubster and I decided that I would take scuba diving lessons as one of my classes.  I made it through the physics thanks to him but when my check-out dive came time, I discovered that I was pregnant. I waited a whole year before I finally did my check-out dive.  We dove mud ponds in Ohio but I just loved being under the water.  We have dived many times since in Jamaica while on vacations.

We set up an aquarium at our little house in Kettering, Ohio.  The hubster brought home a large mouth bass whom we named Bucket Mouth and a rock bass named Sideburn.  Bucket Mouth had tried to eat Sideburn and took half his dorsal fin, hence the name Sideburn.  We turned the fish loose in a little creek near our home one Sunday morning and to this day if we drive that way I think of our little fishies.

We set up another aquarium at our house we purchased in Dayton and raised gold fish which had come from my dad’s outdoor pond.  His neighbors complained about the fish pond and so he gave the fish to us and filled the pond and make a flowerbed.  The pond was only a foot deep and really was not a threat but my dad didn’t like confrontation and got rid of the pond.

When the girls were little we set up a swimming pool in the back yard.  The hubster dug a big hole in the ground and we sank a little plastic pool about five feet big.  It was about eighteen inches in depth.  The girls would take off from the back door and run and dive into the pool.  It made those horrid summer days bearable.  And when the girls went to sleep the hubster and I would go out back and lounge in the cool water.

The girls didn’t want to go out to play if it rained so I made them up as Wonder Woman.  They put on their bathing suits and rubber boots.  I tied towels around their necks for capes and taped their wrists and foreheads with masking tape. They ran around and tromped in the rain puddles and had a blast playing Wonder Woman.

Jess now lives in Arizona and misses the rain.  She says she misses the smell of rain.  I claim she misses the smell of the earthworms that cover the driveway when it rains.

Years later we would go boating at Caesar’s Creek Lake with our friends, The Miller family.  We would take a lunch and the kids would jump off the boat and into the water with their life preservers.  We tried skiing but found knee boarding much more to our liking. The kids had a big innertube and we would pull them around on that.

When we moved to Illinois, we decided that we really had to live on a lake.  We drove out into the country looking for a lake near Roscoe but ended up at Lake Summerset and fell in love.  We spend every day possible in the lake or at the pool.  Every evening when the hubster got home from work we ended up at Beach Two when we claimed we had reserved seats on the beach.  We would swim and lounge until the sun went down and then made it home to fix our dinner.  Addi claims that even now when it is hot she isn’t hungry until she has swum.

Addi brought home a beta fish and set up a little aquarium for him. She even took him to college with her.  I called him Fluffy because he was so beautiful.  She called him Tolstoy (talk about stupid names for a fish!).

One of my good friends, Kim Clark, passed away when she was 39.  She had gotten a goldfish for entertainment and asked me to take it when she became unable to take care of him.  The hubster set up another aquarium and he began raising fancy goldfish.  Kim’s fish was named Marley.  We got a black moor fish and called him Bob.  We then got Rita, Ziggy and the Whalers.  Ziggy tried to eat one of the Whalers and the hubster had to extract the Whaler from Ziggy mouth.

When Marley got really large his wen grew so big it covered his eyes.  The hubster did surgery on him and removed the top of his wen.  I’ll have to blog that story some time.

On occasion when I am canning I don’t have a full canner and so I can water.  I have several jars of canned water in the pantry downstairs.  If there is ever an emergency, I will be prepared.

I drink a lot of water and for some stupid reason I have always thought the water in the bathroom was sweeter than the kitchen tap water.  Perhaps it is that childhood memory of our ice-cold well water in the summertime.

I have so many memories of water and adventures in and with water.  I love living on a lake and seeing so many people enjoying it. I’ve never had a time in my life that I wasn’t without water.  I think the reason I don’t like the desert very much is because there is so little water.  I’ve also never been in a flood.  Our basement gets a little water from a crack in the foundation, but I am pretty sure that our septic pump has never been run.

I’ve got to get off this computer and go get a drink of water.

Peace be with you.