When we were kids, my brother and sisters and I spent between Memorial Day and the first day of school bobbing and splashing in Crystal Lake, about a mile walk from our house. Our mother taught swimming and we learned how to jellyfish float when we are all about four or five (hold your breath, curl up, and hug your knees). From then on, as soon as the temperature was over 70 degrees our environment of choice was that clear, fresh lake water.
After Michael and I started weekending up here from the City, in the summer I trespassed as often as I could across the road to our neighbor's almost lake-size pond. There, I did pretend laps, but mostly I floated on its cool back and communed with frogs, dragonflies, and carp, while keeping a wary eye out for the black snakes and snappers that occasionally surfaced near its shore.
So when we decided to move upstate after my retirement, we were able to sell the apartment we had lived in for 25 years at a price so inflated that we could both build a house and dig a swimming pond. It was finished in the fall before last year, fed by run-off and water flowing through a pipe from the artesian well that supplies our new home. The pond covered about a third of an acre, with its deepest part about 9 feet. Michael built a perfect dock that licked out 15 feet into the water. The pond was all set for swimming, but, as it turned out, I wasn't. My anal cancer treatments started in the spring of 2018. By summer my radiated bottom with its second degree burns precluded baths, and when I asked the nurse if I could swim in my pond, her horrified response suggested that I had wanted to stroll the sewers of Paris. So no swimming last year, but I was hopeful that the nasty chemo and radiation treatments would cure the cancer and I'd be in the pond this summer.
Unfortunately, no cure. Instead the PET scan in late fall showed metastasis to a lymph node in the middle of my chest, and the next one in February lit up two small spots in my liver and my lung. Although unhappy findings, they did not preclude swimming this year. The radiation burns had healed, with no possibility that I would have to endure those treatments again. I was also put on one of the newer immunotherapies, which, at least for me, has had no side effects so far and is allowing normal life. Because this therapy has been showing promise in prolonging life for a number of patients with different metastatic cancers and the pond was completely full, I figured I would still be good to go in the summer.
Then, the same month as that latest dismal scan, the pond leaked, and what had been 8 or 9 feet deep in the middle was now about 2 feet less. Repairing the outflow could only occur in late spring or early summer when the ground around the pond was dry. This most likely meant draining even more water in order to make the repair right at the start of the hot dry time, when it was unlikely that the pond would refill to full capacity before the fall. No splashing this summer, and I couldn't count on the therapy working for another year, which meant no swimming maybe ever.
But, spoiler alert: last week I jumped into the pond. The upside to having construction done in upstate New York is that there are some incredibly competent and skilled workers. The downside is that there aren't many of them and they are booked into forever. And the upside for me in turn, is that the pond hasn't been repaired yet and it's June.
Earlier this week, Michael suggested it might be deep enough to swim in. With great reluctance and doubt, I changed into a makeshift swimming outfit (underwear and a cotton shirt – I was not making any fashion commitment) and walked to the pond. I edged along the dock, now slumped down to the lower water level, and stepped onto the ladder. I had significant concern that I would be sucked into the scummy clay and drown disgustingly, so with great gingerliness, after getting to the lowest rung, I pointed my toe toward the bottom. It didn't touch anything except water. No clay. No muck.
I flung myself backward and began to pull my way across the warm surface of the water in a modified crawl, scooping up the coldness below it. I was eye to eye with some frogs perched on the surface, and I startled a green heron who was binging on their pals at the far end. The pond would be better with a couple additional feet of water, but this was just fine.
This is only the pond's second year of life, so I can lie on my back, arms out, supported by the watery floor, with no worries about nibbling carp or lurking migrant snakes and snapping turtles. No pond weed has yet grown through the muck to trap my feet. Dragonflies helicopter above, and frogs and skating bugs easily race me as I slowly drift past the new cattails. No one is alarmed. I am just one more animal. Far overhead the deep blue summer sky, with its shards of clouds and anchoring sun, is the Mind that meditates for me.
So I will float through the hot days until August, when another scan will reveal the next path in the map of my fate. There is no cure for what I have, even if I can continue my wonderful immunotherapy. Eventually, like chemotherapy, it will no longer resist the malignancy, and my life will have its foreseeable end. So, this might be the only summer I have left, but that's ok. I've lived three quarters of century, and this month I swim in my pond. It's all joy.
