My First Vacation

I had never ridden in a car for five hours. I had never been on vacation before. I had never seen a lake before. It was so big I couldn’t tell where it ended. I doubted if it did.
We were in southern Minnesota at Lou and Ozro Baldwin’s house. It wasn’t a house it was a resort, my mom called it because it had lots of cabins that went with the house. I had never heard of such a thing.
Lou and Ozro had been friends of my mom and dad’s during the depression. I didn’t know what a depression was either, but I heard the grown ups talk about it a lot when I was little. The Baldwin’s had moved from Iowa to Minnesota and bought this resort and rented out the cabins to people like us who were on vacation. I was so excited, but much to my disappointment, we didn’t get to stay in a cabin, we stayed in their house, which was much nicer than ours, but it was still just a house.
In their house they had a little office where they rented fishing boats to people, took money for the cabins, sold fishing licenses, and had a little gift shop.
The first night we were there Mrs. Baldwin fried fish for our supper. It was delicious. Crispy and golden brown, but there was also something else on the platter that I just loved. My family kept looking at me and smiling as I attacked these little things that looked like golden crunchy cakes of some kind. I found out later that they were fish eggs. I didn’t care they were wonderful.
I got my first ride in a boat the next day. My father wasn’t a fisherman, but wanted to go for a boat ride. The whole family went. It was a little scary, but it was so beautiful out on that never ending body of water.
I can remember that the day that we left, I wanted to spend the fifty cents that I had in my little red change purse. I had saved it from my allowance. Mrs. Baldwin had a pair of swan salt and pepper shakers on her shelf for sale for fifty cents. I asked her if I needed two more cents for tax and she said that Minnesota didn’t charge tax. I to this day do not know if that was true, but I was able to take those beautiful little swans home. They were white with gold speckles on the wings and little pink rosebuds on the tips of the wings.
As I grew older and moved, the swans were moved with me. They sat on my knick knack shelf until I was well into my fifties and then they just disappeared. I have no idea what happened to them, at one point, one of them was cracked, but I still dusted them and protected them. I loved my little white swans.