HANG YOUR CLOTHES ON A HICKORY LIMB

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Kids delight in a place where no rules are posted: "Take showers ...wear bathing caps ...no running ...no pushing ...no splashing ...no shouting..." — no fun. There's nobody there with a whistle declaring a periodic intermission. You can wear what you want — cutoff jeans seem to be the vogue in our pond — or go "bare naked" if your sense of propriety allows.

The fastidious are repelled by the place, and that usually includes mothers. "Bathers" prefer sandy bottoms or the Mediterranean blue of a chlorinated pool to the tadpoles and cattails of a farm pond. So they don't hang around under the diving board getting in your way. Swimming holes, as a rule, attract swimmers, and they go quite a way toward building swimming skills. It's a matter of survival.

A swimming hole is so totally unsafe that your mom doesn't dare foist your little brother on you, saying, "Look after him." She'll see to it that he learns to swim first. The place cannot be reached by telephone, so, though you may catch Hail Columbia when you get home, you can soak for hours undisturbed. It is not uncommon, of course, for your sister to ride over on her bike and holler out to where you're floating on your inner tube, "You're gonna get it when you get home!"

Another beauty of a swimming hole is that you don't have to spend your Saturday mornings cleaning it. No dragging out the hose and the wand, changing filters, pouring in chemicals. There are no vending machines, so there is almost no litter — an occasional soap wrapper, sometimes a ragged towel or an abandoned inner tube.

It's not the most sanitary place one could swim, I suppose, though I never knew country kids to carry home ear infections as kids do from city pools. Nor is it the safest place (we have hung up a life buoy purchased at bargain rates form the Soil and Water Conservation Service). But it's close to home, and the price is right. And the fun! Doggoned if I don't think I'll go cut the legs off my blue jeans.

— Reprinted From: Harvest of Bittersweet by Patricia Penton Leimbach. Copyright by Patricia Penton Leimbach.

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