Second Mill Pond Revisited in Daydreaming on the Porch

  • March 8, 2024, 12:26 a.m.
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  • Public

It is late at night and I’m tired, but I want to record some thoughts I’ve been mulling over lately. They deal with the subject of memory. I’ve been thinking a lot about that word and all that it means. It is freighted with so many layers and contexts of meaning.

It seems that now when I am thinking about my past, I can remember only what I consciously try to piece together from some fragment or fragments of memory. Then, mysteriously, this becomes a cascading series of recollectiions that enter my conscious mind.

It occurs to me that to really recall an event or time long ago, I have to conjure up the smells, the tastes, the physical settings as concretely as I can. But they remain fragments and are easily lost. But, if I start to write about them, as I am here, more fragments of memories come up from I don’t know where, and I’m able to begin recreating the memory in a way that I feel confident is an accurate picture of the event or time out of which the memory arose. Or at least, as accurate as I think it can be. Writing about it is, in a sense, reliving it.

Then, if I choose to do so, I begin the process of trying to recall emotional states of that time past, or view them somewhat analytically for meaning to me in the present. Without this process that I gradually build upon, the memories remain static, set pieces of stage scenery that remain unused . I want to try to understand why I remember what I do.

Years ago, when I was around 9 or 10, we spent our summer vacations in Sumter at my aunt’s house. It was here that longing for escape from the seemingly interminable school year was realized, and I could go swimming in a mill pond just outside of town.

I remember how the water smelled. It was a fresh and earthy smell. The waters that backed up behind the dam had come from blackwater streams and swamps, darkened by tannin from tree leaves that had fallen into the water. There was a stationary plaform just beyond the shallow section near the shore, a hundred yards from the grassy edge. Here my brother and I, swimmers since an early age, would swim out and dive into the deep, cool waters. I wouldn’t go too far down because the deeper I dived, the colder and darker the water became, and there seemed to us no bottom to it at all. Stroking hard back up toward the surface, we’d burst through once again into the fresh air and sunlight and pull ourselves up onto the diving platform, which rested flat on the water, anchored to the bottom of the pond.

After a morning swimming at Second Mill, we’d head home, my brother, father and I, and come in to a kitchen table filled with the most delicious Southern food: fried bream, rice and gravy, biscuits, black-eye peas, freshly-sliced tomatoes, poll beans with fatback, and iced tea. I’d eat until I couldn’t possibly hold any more. That was the tradition of those days of summer vacation. Swim at the pond, maybe go fishing later in the afternoon. Just have fun doing things we could never do at home in New Orleans.
That is why those memories are so deeply etched in my mind. Each new school year, filled with worries and anxieties, my thoughts would return to the summer just past. By that time in September, and more so in later years, those vacations assumed the rosiest of glows. They became golden ages in my young life. I’d daydream about the jukebox on the dance stand by the shore of the pond and hear the old Fats Domino tunes, “Blueberry Hill” and “Walkin to New Orleans.” I’d wish I was back there because it seemed to me, several months later, a very long time ago. And life was oh so much more complicated and difficult.

Today, the pond is still there, the cypress trees beautiful around the perimeter of the pond and back toward where the feeder creek begins to back up behind the dam. But a four-lane highway crosses right next to where we used to go swimming, and the beach is closed to the public. People still fish along the banks, but it’s a different place.

When I drove across the pond a few years ago, I found myself looking to the side where the shallow water began and we used to wade as children out toward the diving platform. I looked from my car window at the dark water, and it still appeared clean and fresh and inviting, and I wondered what it would feel like now to dive down into its depths and come up, stroking hard to clear the surface and hauling myself up onto a now non-existent platform, breathless from the exertion, but exhilarated and happy.

These are the kinds of childhood memories that last a lifetime.


Last updated March 08, 2024


Jinn March 08, 2024 (edited March 08, 2024)

Edited

They are and you describe yours so well. It’s interesting how memories hit us. I was having a flashback today of when my Mother took me to Florida . I am pretty sure I was seven and she stole me out of my Grandparent’s house in the middle of the night. I remember the shocked feeling of being awakened and she was there and whispering. She was telling me to be quiet and trying to find my clothes in the dark. Telling me she was going to take me to see the ocean( and I had never seen it ). It never occurred to me to cry out ; I just went with her . She only took the clothes I put on and we drove off into the night. When I woke up I was stiff , cold , and hungry . I wanted my Grandparents but I was always a little frightened of my Mother because her moods were so erratic. When I asked to go home ; she would get angry. We drove and drove. I needed the restroom but she seemed to take forever to find one. We stayed in a motel but I did not have any clothes to change or pajamas . She had me bathe and put the clothes I had worn back on. I felt dirty. We stopped to eat at a restaurant and they gave me grits instead of mashed potatoes and I was so unhappy I started to cry . So many memories… and not such good ones. When I think about it ; it is almost like reliving it .

Oswego Jinn ⋅ March 08, 2024

What happened at the conclusion of that scary, bewildering episode? Did you return to your grandparents? I know you’ve written about your mother before, but I can’t recall.

That word, “flashback,” is highly significant because it seems to me those sudden intrusions of usually traumatic, or at the least, very bad memories, are perhaps the most accurate and disturbing.

I know for example, the specific details of certain flashbacks from my episodes of major depression are unalterable and true, but even more so, they have become part of me — brain, mind, and spirit.

music & dogs & wine March 08, 2024

You are such a beautiful writer, you write so vividly! I can picture exactly what you are talking about. Those summer swims sound so lovely.

Oswego music & dogs & wine ⋅ March 09, 2024

Thank you! :). Unforgettable memories and times in what I would describe as the “Golden Age” of my childhood.

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