Free Little Altars Everywhere by Rebecca Wells

our early swim. We go down the hill and I always stop at this little place where water comes out of a concrete culvert and makes a little pool. The farmer who lives by there has got it dammed up. I count tadpoles in there and rinse my face, and on the way back from swimming I stick my feet in there to cool them off. I think it’s a magic pool, because one morning I was there and counted twelve tadpoles and when I came back there was nineteen! All kinds of things like that happen at Spring Creek.
    The best swimming hole is Little Spring Creek. You’ve got Big Spring Creek, Little Spring Creek, and Dido Creek, but Little Spring Creek is the best. It has a sandy beach where we lay our towels and stuff, andthe ladies set up their chairs and the ice chest. Right around there is the shallow part where the little babies can play. And then there’s this big log that divides the shallow end from the deep end. You can sit on that log and watch everything—the ladies rubbing on their oil, big trees on both sides of the creek, dogs sleeping in the sun on the bank, turtles lined up sunning themselves on the slimy log that none of us fool with. We call it the Turtle Log. It’s all theirs. We have our log, and they have theirs. You can look down at the deep end where there’s a rope swing hung from a huge tree, where you can swing out like Tarzan and holler before you drop down into the water below. You’ve got to be sure and let go of that rope, though, because one time a little boy whose brother was a friend of my cousin got scared and wouldn’t let go, and he hit into the tree and smashed his skull in! We didn’t see it, but we all knew about it. So it doesn’t matter how scared you are, you’ve got to let go of that rope and drop down into the deep end.
    Your first dive into the water in the morning is the finest thing in the world. It’s never too cold. It’s Louisiana summer creek water, not some northern-state water—where I’ve never been, but I know it’s so cold it takes your breath away and would give Daddy a heart attack. Little Spring Creek is the kind of water that lets you wake up slow, lets you roll over on your back and float and stare at the clouds without getting the shivers, without having to swim fast to keep fromfreezing to death. Mama says, This is the kind of water that spoils Southerners for any other part of the country.
    All that happens in Little Spring Creek is that your skin comes all alive and maybe a dragonfly lands on your shoulder with the blue-green colors of their wings shining in the sunlight. You don’t swat dragonflies because they’re the good bugs. They go around eating up the bad ones that itch you to death.
    Man, we have the best tractor inner-tubes in the state of Louisiana. They’re from my Daddy’s farm machinery and Mama painted “Walker” on them with white paint, but we still let other people use them. They’re big enough for four of us to sit on, and you can paddle out into the deep end and then—real careful—you can stand up on the inner-tube! Sidda and me do it the best: stand up real slow and hold hands and balance ourselves. We stand there on that tractor inner-tube perfectly balanced, with the sky a big blue tent over our heads. We stand real still and then we start rocking back and forth as hard as we can and still try to stay on. We see how long we can do it and how hard before we fall off. The only thing is, those inner-tubes have got those little nozzles where you put the air in, and if you aren’t careful you fall down on them and scrape your body up something awful. Almost every kid in Spring Creek has got one of those long scratches on their bodies. You’re just lucky if it doesn’t make you bleed, because then one of the Ya-Yas will make youget out and they put Mercurochrome and a Band-Aid on you from the blue tin first-aid kit. And then you have to sit on the blanket with them, and they all say, I just hope he’s had his latest tetanus