Yesterday I went out to Peach Days with my mom, my sister and her kids. Peach Days is one of those fun little hometown festivals with vendor booths selling all kinds of deep fried goodies or homemade crafts. I love to go see what kinds of fun, new crafts are on the market, but mostly, I go for the Navajo taco. I love Navajo tacos, but they are a pain to make. You have to dirty every dish in the house, and the batch makes about a zillion scones (that I am then forced to consume smothered in delicious honeybutter!). So...when I can go to Peach Days and pick up a Navajo taco for lunch without having the threat of a million extra calories staring me in the face in the form of fried dough and honeybutter, I take advantage of the opportunity!
I'm sure by now you are wondering what this has to do with swimming?? Well, hold your horses, the connection is coming! As I sat and ate my Navajo taco, a couple sat down next to us at the table. It turned out to be Mayor McArthur and his wife, Bunny. We talked about a variety of things- he sang "Are You From Dixie" and recited a couple poems- and my niece and nephew played with the water weenies they bought at one of the booths. It was a very enjoyable afternoon.
As the kids were playing with their water weenies, my sister and I were talking about how they have evolved since we were kids. Back in our day, water weenies were homemade. A piece of tubing that we filled out of the hose with a pen casing as the nozzle. You usually got so completely soaked in the process of filling the water weenie that it didn't really matter if you got sprayed with one later. It was just fun to run through the yard spraying one another!
As we reminisced about the good old days of our youth, I got up to throw my plate in the garbage can and was reminded of another thing we used to do as kids that I'm pretty sure was a Bundy family special. As I have mentioned before, my upbringing was pretty humble. We didn't have much extra money, but we did have a lot of creativity! And this is where the swimming finally comes in... We didn't have a pool. Nobody in our neighborhood did. But on hot summer days we loved to be in the water. Sometimes we would walk to the local city pool down by the high school-usually without shoes, on pavement that was hot enough to fry an egg, so we would run from one patch of shade or grass to the next till we got there. Still, there were times that wasn't an option either, so....we devised a more creative solution for our problem. We would take the fifty gallon barrels that littered the landscape of our back yard, find some duct tape to cover any of the holes that might allow the water to escape the barrel, then fill them with water and bob up and down in them. You can't really call it swimming because there's no way to swim in a 50 gallon barrel. But the bobbing was great!
I suppose I should probably contact Jeff Foxworthy about this one. "You might be a redneck if..."
But it was fun. And I think we get big points for creativity! Thanks to all my older sibling who taught me the ways of the Samurai!
