(Photo: Camp Fire Girls’ Camp in the Sierras, 1958)

My earliest memories of childhood, going back to age two, are recorded in my memoir, Not a Poster Child. I shared much of what my childhood was like from the perspective of a child with a disability in that book.

Summer days bring forth a host of other memories for me, however, that had less to do with having a mostly paralyzed leg from polio. And of course, every physical thing and many emotional things that I have experienced in my life have been affected by my disability, so, it’s in here.

My father and mother made the decision to leave Los Angeles in 1951, when I was three and a half, after I got out of the hospital where I endured six months of polio treatment. My milkman dad bought a dairy product delivery service in Yuba City and adjacent Marysville, California, two small towns in the northern Central Valley. It was a good place to grow up; there were peach and almond orchards only about four blocks from our home, and no one on our street of two- and three-bedroom homes on large lots ever locked their doors except at night and when away. It’s much different now, of course; the orchards were torn out to create hundreds of tract homes, and the town is a suburb of Sacramento, essentially; a fifty-minute drive for the locals to a small city where there are more jobs. I believe people started locking their doors in the daytime in the 1970’s or 80’s.

In summertime, the weather was unbearably hot; it was not unusual for the thermometer to get up above 100 and repeat that daily for weeks. We had a swamp cooler on our roof, which was noisy, and when it needed repair, sometimes dripped water into the hallway of our small house. At night, we turned it off so we could sleep, opened all the windows, and hoped the temperature would go down to 75. I recall waking in the middle of the night and throwing off my sole cover, the top sheet, to attempt to cool off.

Our county pridefully referred to itself as the Peach Bowl of the World because our ranchers grew so many of the delicious stone fruits. (As teenagers, we called it the Peach Pit of the World, disenchanted with our remote location and limited cultural options.) We had a peach tree that didn’t produce well, so my mother would buy flats of peaches, usually freestones since they were easier to work with. She’d can them in Mason jars in boiling vats of water on those sweltering summer days, sometimes in her underwear. Tomatoes, green beans, okra, corn, too, mostly from our garden. (I used to can produce in my 20’s and 30’s but gave it up eventually.) Or she’d freeze peaches with a little sugar, pulling them out of our huge horizontal deep freeze in the fall or winter for a dessert that felt like a gift. I recall helping wash or cut the fruit and feeling like I was covered in peach fuzz on my usually sweaty body. It was hard to get the itchy stuff off once it was anywhere but your hands.

The sidewalks were so hot that you couldn’t really go barefoot, or you’d burn the soles of your feet. I remember chancing this when I’d go down the block in my matching shorts and midriff-baring tops to visit my best friend, Daralyn. I’d walk on the lawns of the two neighbors in between and then skip gimpily along the hot sidewalk for a few steps, and back onto a lawn, then the final leg to her house on the corner. I wore tennis shoes a lot in the summer, because I couldn’t keep rubber flip-flops on my weak paralyzed foot. But we all went barefoot quite a bit, and I wanted to be like other kids.

The good side of this scorching climate was that everyone went swimming, a lot. This is one physical activity that polio survivors can do.

For my first time in the pool of Daralyn’s next-door neighbor, around age eight or nine, she helped me don a life jacket, but we put it on upside down, and I ended up with my head in the water and the bigger end of me sticking up. The adults, whom I didn’t know, must have seen the problem, or my friend turned me right side up, and we got me to the stairs and took the damned lifejacket off, with me sputtering and coughing water thinking that I could have drowned. I don’t think we were invited back.

But I persevered, and the summer after fourth grade I taught myself to swim at Camp Fire Girls’ Camp. There was a class I took, but I was wary about others seeing me struggle to learn, having endured taunts about my limp on solid ground at school, so the WSI let me work on my strokes and breathing into the water on my own in the shallow end. Back and forth I swam across the width of the pool. She kept an eye on me, kindly encouraging and correcting as needed, which I appreciated deeply. I probably did not have the presence of mind to thank her at that age. I came home a swimmer, albeit a beginner. When I was in middle or high school, the neighbors across the street put in a pool, which I was invited to use whenever I liked.

In the mid-sixties, the town installed a public pool next door to the middle school I’d attended. During the long summer breaks from high school, that was the place to be, and I had a beach bag that was horizontally striped in broad lines of yellow, orange, and hot pink that I thought was trendy. One-piece swimsuits of course became a more important article of clothing when one’s body was on display for many high school friends, particularly the boys. I had a great deal of self-consciousness about my skinny dysfunctional leg, and when boys would come by to talk to me and a girlfriend as we sat on our towels on the concrete deck, I’d try to always keep my normal-sized leg covering my small leg and tiny foot, but sometimes it was so hot that this was really uncomfortable.

(We also used a lot of baby oil with iodine in it to cook our skins, so now in sunny weather I wear SPF 70 on the places where thousands of freckles have usurped what used to be a coppery tan. Multiple sunburns from fifty to sixty years past have me getting a body check at the dermatologist’s annually.)

I felt a physical freedom I’d not experienced previously when I learned to move easily through water. The weightlessness and the support provided by buoyancy was not only relaxing but invigorating, and I became unaware of limping when walking in a pool. So much less effort than it takes to carry and propel my leg on terra firma. In a pool, I felt nearly a physical equal to my peers. I liked to roll over and over in the water, and float on my back… it was my place of peace and has been for all my life. And it was, and still is, a lot of fun.

Did you swim when you were a kid? What summer memories would you share?