A Splash From The Past

I had a reserve soak in the pool at the company picnic on Friday. It was a nice sunny day and plastered with goggles and smiles on their faces, the kids were bobbing all over the pool. They couldn’t have been more than 8 years old, some as young as two. There were about 10 to 15 of them in the pool at one time, jumping from the edges or diving board, dog paddling to a nearby grown up, throwing a ball around, or going underneath to touch the bottom.

It brought more than a smile on my face to see the fearless leap off the edge by a two year old, and the unfair start of a race between two from the edge of the pool to a grown up. It brought back memories of playing tag in the sea, racing from home to what we called, “The Big Stone” 50 feet away. There were times when we competed to bring up the most handful of sand, little stones or loose coral 5 to 15 feet under the water. Off cause we did those things without goggles and the obscurity of salt water in our eyes. But such was the product of our environment.

During school time our routines involved coming home from school, doing homework, grabbing a small but quick bit to eat (because we had to…it’s a parent thing) and then head for the sea. We were in the sea everyday during the summer for no less than two hours. Sometimes our fingers were, “pruned to the bone” as my mother would say. And then there were times when we stayed so long that we built an appetite that would make Emeril Lagasse proud.

There was nothing more fun that being in the sea when we were young, until we grow up to be teenagers. Well, we did spend time in the sea as teenagers, but not as much as we did when we were younger. What we did the sea as teenagers? Hmmmmm… That I will reserve for another “The Sound of Flowing Water” blog posting.