cake

Life in the Hills:

Yesterday was a nearly fourteen hour day for me, but along about evening I did take an hour off work to go swimming. I have mentioned the swimming lake before. It's about a quarter mile long, a hundred yards or so wide, filling a deep depression in the hills between two weirs on one of the feeders of the Rappahannock river. There are two places where it's easy to enter and leave because it is rocky there, but the rest of the long edges are dangerous because they are deep, silty mud.

Our closest neighbors have three boys, ages nine through twelve, all of whom have names starting with the letter "D." The effect of this is that I know one of them is named Dylan, but not which one, and the others' names are lost on me. The youngest of the boys is the one who brought me the eggs the other day.

When I got down to the lake, the three were in one of the shallow places, stirring up a ton of mud and engaged in their favorite sport -- turtle hunting. I gather that their mother lets them keep turtles they catch for a few days, but only a few, so they're always hunting new ones as replacements. I left them to their sport and took my laps around the lake.

When I finished, I settled down in one end of the lake and started doing breathing exercises and kata under water. The water helps you by adding some small extra resistance to the exercise. In short order, the boys came over and splashed into the water around me.

"You're really brave to swim all the way to the end of the lake," the oldest said.

"It's not that hard," I told them.

"Will you take us, then?"

Groan. Now I've done it... their mother is going to kill me.

I gave them a severe look. "Can you swim?" I asked.

"Yes!" all three answered at once.

"I know you can dog paddle," I replied. "But can you swim?"

Well, they promised they could, so I told them we'd swim across the lake and back -- a couple hundred yards or so -- and then, if they did that well, we could take the long swim. We only got maybe halfway across before the youngest was panting and needed to turn back.

The other two seemed to be doing well, so I made them swim back with me to ensure that the youngest got to the shallow water all right, and then I told them they could swim to the end of the lake with me. I explained where the deep channels were, and to stay clear of the muddy sides so they didn't get fouled. Then, we started off.

It was apparently a lot harder than they thought it would be. We only got about halfway on the long stretch before they pronounced that they were ready to go back again. No problem -- I didn't really want to be swimming in deep water with somebody else's kids anyway. We swam back, and then I had to go home, and they went back to hunting turtles in the shallows.

I had to work the rest of the night, but along about ten o'clock my wife came up to the office to say that we'd had visitors. The boy's mother, she said, had come by.

"Uh-oh," I said.

"And she brought you a cake," my wife added. "She was really touched that you'd taken time out to spend with her boys."

Apparently the boys had gone home and told her the whole thing. Instead of being mad, she was touched. Which is how it should be, I guess, but somehow it isn't what I expected.

Still, when I was a boy, a lot of men took time out of their lives to teach me things. It's only fair to pass on the favor, and it turns out to be a bigger pleasure than I would have expected.

Also, the cake is delicious.