Summer Memories

9 Rahmat 163 B.E. – July 2, 2006 A.D.

Summer is here! When summer comes, my mind wonders back to Oklahoma and my Grandparents mobile home on Lake Blackwell. Every year beginning with the Fourth of July weekend, my grandparents would take us to their mobile home every weekend. We would spend the weekends on Lake Blackwell boating and water skiing. My grandparents would plant a garden with potatoes, corn, squish and other good things on their leased lot at the Lake.

We always referred to Lake Blackwell as the Lake. We always called the mobile home a trailer house and Independence Day the Fourth of July. When we went to the trailer house on the Lake, we would go on Friday evening and stay until Sunday afternoon. That was the only time we didn’t go to church on Sunday. Instead of going to church or rather the First Southern Baptist Mission in the Heights’, we spent Sunday morning on the Lake and Sunday evening going back to Blackwell. I always enjoyed those weekends at the Lake, we fished, we water skied, we swam around my grandparents boat dock. My grandfather never left the motor boat at the Lake; instead, he would put the boat on the boat trailer and pull the boat back and forth every weekend.

In Blackwell, my grandparents lived in the Smelter Heights’, on the other side of the tracks, in the section of town located near the Zinc Smelter that provided jobs from before World War II. I haven’t been back to Blackwell so I don’t know if the Smelter Heights’ are still there or if the Zinc Smelter is still there. I think I’d like to go back sometime, but I’m not even sure about that. There are many other places in the world I’d like to go before I go back to Blackwell.

Maybe I’ll look up Blackwell, Oklahoma and see if they have a website. It would be interesting to see how the town has changed since I was last there. They say you can’t go home again, and I think that is true. In my case I can’t go home again because I can’t go someplace I’m already at. Now home is Las Vegas, Blackwell is where I was born and raise, at least until I started to high school, in high school we moved from Blackwell to Shawnee, Oklahoma. I did go back to Blackwell after I graduated from high school, but it wasn’t the same as when I’d been a child.