When I was a kid, I never went swimming wearing a swimsuit if I could help it. There’s something about the feel of the water against your bare skin. Once you’ve experienced it, second-best won’t do. I suppose it’s the closest I’ll ever get to knowing what it’s like to be a mermaid. And since we had a pool in the backyard when I was growing up, opportunities abounded. There was also my (thankfully) brief hippie period in the seventies when nude beaches were where the “cool” people went.
I hadn’t been skinny-dipping in years, however, before this past summer’s vacation at my friend Jon’s house on Wood Lake, in Wisconsin. But there I was, with the water steps away, beckoning to the child in me. The neighbors on either side of the house were only around on weekends, so it seemed to my husband Sandy and me that we had the lake to ourselves during the week, except for the occasional fishermen in his boat way off in the distance. So, in the mornings with the sun barely kissing the horizon, in we’d go, slipping like catch-and-release trout into the water. As soon as I hit the water I was flooded with memories. Of childhood camping trips with my family, diving off the rocks on the far side of the lake with my sisters and brother. Moonlight dips in the backyard pool. The secluded mountain grotto I came upon once while hiking in the wilds of British Columbia, where I lived briefly as a teen bride, that begged to be experienced sans sweaty hiking clothes.
The feeling was indescribable. Shedding my city skin, I became one with Nature as I stroked my way to the buoys marking a shallow area in the middle of the lake. From there I could get a closer look of the deserted island that’s a lookout for the bald eagles that nest on the other side of the lake. I’d look up at the eagle perched in the tree with the bare limbs and wonder if he was looking back at me. In those moments were just two creatures in the wild, as God intended us. I wanted for nothing more.
