Day at the Lake

I was thinking about summer days spent at Mueller's Lake when I made this quilt a few years ago.

I grew up outside of a small town in Northern Wisconsin. We lived 1/2 mile from a beautiful spring-fed lake. This past weekend, Oliver got to swim there for the first time in his life.

My Mom also grew up on Mueller's Lake. She and her friends ran a consession stand back in the 1960s. They also cleaned up the garbage and took great care of the beach. She said the Polar kids kept the beach clean and nice, but it was also the Polar kids who always got blamed for any trouble on the Lake. Trouble usually came from outside of Polar ...

When I was a kid, I remember a raft out beyond the buoys. My Mom said she used to swim across the Lake when she was young. When I was a kid, the other side of the lake always looked so far away ... Now that' I'm an adult, it doesn't look so far.

When I was a kid, the public beach got so bad that Ma wouldn't let us swim there for safety reasons. There was a lot of broken glass and garbage that never seemed to get cleaned up. People would also come with big-ass motor boats pulling water-skiers. It's still a relatively small lake for speedboats. Those boaters were not very careful about watching for swimmers, either. They would motor right up to the buoys, and sometimes even over them. It seems to be better now ... at least it's clean again. We didn't give up swimming though.

Ma had an arrangement with a neighbor who lived on the lake. They let us swim at their private beach just down from the public beach. They had a raft that looked kind of like an oil rig. It had a high point to dive off of, but no off-shore drilling.

The other neighbors had a tall orange slide. We had to pour a pail of water down first or we'd stick to the hot metal slide. Once the slide was lubed, it was a lot of fun!

Lots of seaweed that was interesting to study underwater with a scuba mask. But it was creepy to touch with feet, or other body parts. You never knew what monster lurked in the deep!

I saw a bald eagle flying over the lake this weekend. So nice to see those majestic birds making a comeback!