The Creek Behind My Farm
The morning they named the water
I put on my good blue dress for a swimming hole, which is a thing I never thought I would do.
It was the last Saturday in June, and I stood in front of the bedroom mirror the way I have not stood since my own wedding, turning this way and that, fussing over a collar nobody was going to look at. My name is Ruth. I am seventy years old. I have lived my whole life on the same quarter section outside the town of Harlan, where the county road turns to gravel and the gravel runs down past my barn to a stand of cottonwoods and the creek that bends behind them.
They had called me three weeks before, the mayor and two of the women off the park board, and sat at my kitchen table and told me what they wanted to do. They wanted to name the swimming hole after me. They wanted to put up a sign. They wanted to hold a dedication on the last Saturday in June, because for forty summers that was the Saturday everybody in Harlan knew to find me down at the water.
I told them no at first. I told them a bend in a creek does not need a name, it has gotten along fine without one since before the town was here. The mayor, who I taught to swim when he was a boy with a cowlick and a cast on his arm, just smiled at me and said the sign was already made.
So I put on my good blue dress. I pinned my hair. I walked out my own back door and down through the pasture gate and along the path my feet have worn into that bank over four decades, and I went to go watch them name the water.
I want to tell you what I found when I came down that bank. But I have to tell you the rest of it first, all forty summers of it, and the summer before all of them, the one I have never told this town. Because none of what happened that Saturday makes any sense without the thing I carried down to the water the very first June, and every June after.
I taught every child in Harlan to swim. Free. I never charged a dime, and I never missed a June, not for sickness, not for weather, not for anything, for forty years. Hundreds of them. I could not tell you the number if you asked, and I never kept one, because you do not keep a count of a thing you do for a reason like mine.
Let me tell you about the water first.