Second Mill Pond Revisited

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 drive across the pond, I often find myself looking to the side to where the shallow water began and we used to wade as children out toward the diving platform. I look from my car window at the dark water, and it still looks clean and fresh and inviting, and I wonder 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.

(Written in the summer of 1998)