“You’re eighty-two years old, Mom. It’s an embarrassment.” My uncle Arne said it from the end of our dock on the Fourth of July, loud enough for every lawn chair on the grass to hear him.
Grandma Ingrid stood at the top of the swim ladder with her canvas bag open in her hands. She had just found out the bag was empty. Her white swim cap was gone, and so was her calm.
Not all of it. Grandma does not lose all of anything. But I saw her fingers go still on the strap of that bag, and I saw her look out across the half mile of water to the city beach.
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“I put it away,” Arne said. “You’ll drown out there, and the whole family ends up on the Eau Claire news. Is that what you want? Your grandkids watching that on the six o’clock?”
Nobody on the lawn said a word. My cousins’ kids stopped tossing the bean bags. Somebody’s paper plate of brats and potato salad sat forgotten on the arm of an Adirondack chair, and a yellow jacket found it.
I am Britt Lindgren. I was twenty-eight that summer, a dental hygienist in Rice Lake, and I had spent my whole life watching my grandmother swim across that lake on the Fourth of July.
She started in 1962, the summer she was eighteen and newly engaged to my grandpa, Howard. He bet her a root beer float she could not make it from the family dock to the beach in Chetek. She made it. He paid. She never stopped.
Sixty-four Fourths in a row. This was supposed to be the sixty-fifth. She swam through two pregnancies, a broken wrist in 1988, the wet summer of 1993, and the summer Grandpa died, when nobody thought she would get in the water at all.
She got in. She always got in.