The Summer Green Keeper

Margaret stood at her kitchen window, watching her granddaughter Emma splash in the backyard pool, and suddenly it was 1952 again. She was eight years old, standing knee-deep in Miller's Creek with her best friend Ruth, both of them gangly-legged and freckle-faced, learning the courage to let go of the muddy bottom and float.

'Spinach!' Ruth's mother would call every afternoon, her voice carrying across three backyards. 'Come in and eat your spinach!' It was their standing joke—the dark, slippery greens that made them strong like Popeye, or so their mothers claimed. But neither girl minded really, because Mrs. Klein grew the most tender spinach in her victory garden, and she served it warm with butter and vinegar, not the canned stuff that Margaret's mother attempted to pass off as vegetable.

That summer, the summer of the polio scare when the public pool stayed closed, Margaret and Ruth swam every day in the creek. They swam until their fingers wrinkled, until Ruth's mother called them home for supper, until the fireflies began their evening dance. And somewhere between learning to float and mastering the breaststroke, they became the keepers of each other's secrets—Margaret's fear of her father's temper, Ruth's longing for a father she'd never known.

'Some things,' Ruth told her one afternoon while they dried off on the creek bank, 'you just have to swim through.' They'd had this conversation many times over the years, through marriage and children, through Ruth's battle with breast cancer, through Margaret's lonely years after Arthur passed. Ruth died three years ago, leaving Margaret the spinach starter from her mother's garden, passed down through four generations.

Now Emma waved from the pool. 'Grandma! Watch me swim!' And Margaret smiled, recognizing the same determined stroke she'd first seen in Miller's Creek seventy years ago. Some things, indeed, you just have to swim through. The rest— friendship, love, the quiet wisdom of growing things—you carry with you always.