C ~ Camponella Swim Party

These are the continuing adventures of a Swedish immigrant during her first year as an American. She boldly went where she'd never gone before...please come along on Adventures in America.

For this story to make sense, I think you need to know a bit about the neighborhood I used to live in, and the neighborhood we lived in our first year in America.

In Sweden, we lived on a dead end street, which was an off-shoot of another dead-end street. Kids lived everywhere. If you wanted to play with someone, you knocked on a door and asked. No arranged “play dates”.

The neighborhood we moved into used to be a “regular” neighborhood, but had now been zoned commercial, and there were very few kids around. In fact, appalling to me, we had parking meters IN FRONT OF OUR HOUSE.

However, we did manage to meet one family who lived diagonally from us. They were a large family, don't recall how many kids, but at least the two youngest still lived at home, and The Nutritionist made sure that we'd become friends. She invited them over to play.

It was a hot day, and we had one of those pools in the backyard that has the hard sides, and if you have a pesky little brother, all he has to do is push one of those sides down to drain the water. Of course, he had two older sisters who were equally pushy (Ok, I'd never call Swissie pushy, but you know me. PUSHY.) He did not get away with that more than once.

So here we are, the Camponella (names have been changed to protect those who prefer not to be nude in public) kids are over, it's summer, it's HOT. A kind of hot that Swedes rarely experience, and though we had glorious air-conditioning (oh my, what a wonderful invention) my mother liked for us to play outside.

I can't believe that when I went through the albums I found a picture of that exact afternoon. As you can see, my little brother had to be, um, edited for the sake of my PG rating...

The pool beckoned. I was going to loan a suit to the older daughter who was probably somewhere near the age of me and Swissie, but the little brother couldn't lend a suit because DataBoy was 2 at this time. So of course, as normal Swedish folks, we said, “You don't need a bathing suit, just take your clothes off.” In Sweden, kids don't really wear bathing suits until they're quite a bit older, as I recall, 6 or 7. (The Swede will probably correct me, but remember, these are MY recollections from over 38 years ago...) They were appalled. And went home.

I don't remember if we ever got to play with them again, but we probably did. I'm fairly certain The Nutritionist made amends with Mrs. Camponella and explained the cultural differences and all that stuff. However, I don't think they ever used our pool.

P.S After going through the photo albums, choosing pictures for my series, I found lots of pictures with the Camponellas, so we DID get to play with them again.  Inside.