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Sidda began to write instead about the Ya-Yas. Her hand moved across the page swiftly. Sidda did not stop to correct herself, or to analyze why she was doing this. She simply glanced at the creekbank photo, sat at the cabin’s table, and wrote from the heart.
    Oh, how Mama and the Ya-Yas laughed! I could hear them from the water where I played with my brothers and my sister, Lulu, and the other Petites Ya-Yas. We’d plunge into the creek, then burst back up and hear their laughter. Caro’s chortle sounded like a grin doing a polka. Teensy’s giggle had a bayou flavor, as if somebody sprinkled Tabasco on it. Necie’s hee-hee-hee sounded exactly like that. And Mama’s head-thrown-back, open-back, open-throated roar always made people turn around and look at her when she laughed in public.
    The Ya-Yas laughed a lot when they were around each other. They’d get going and not be able to stop. They’d laugh till big, fat tears rolled down their cheeks. They’d laugh until one would accuse the others of making her tee-tee in her pants. I don’t know what they laughed about. I only know that their laughter was beautiful to hear and see,and that it is something I wish I had more of in my life right now. I like to pride myself on doing many things better than my mother, but she was always better at giggling with her girlfriends.
    This is how the Ya-Yas used to be on the creekbank in the summers of my childhood. They’d coat their bodies with a baby-oil-and-iodine mixture, which they shook up in a big Johnson’s Baby Oil bottle. The mixture was heavy, reddish-brown, an almost bloodlike tint. They’d coat their faces, arms, and legs, then take turns rubbing the solution on each other’s backs.
    When my mother lay down, her hands went under her chin, her head rolled to one side, her eyes closed, and she’d let out a long sigh that said how much she loved it all. I loved seeing my mother so relaxed.
    This was in the days before anybody worried about skin cancer, long before the rays of the sun were thought to be anything but healthy. Before we killed the ozone that stood sentry between our flesh and the sun.
    Mama and Caro usually wore striped tank suits, replicas of ones they used to wear when they were lifeguards at Camp Minnie Maddern for Southern Girls, before they married and had babies.
    My mother was a beautiful swimmer. Her stroke was the Australian crawl. Watching Mama swim was like watching a woman who knew how to waltz perfectly, only her partner was not a man, but creek water. Her kick was strong, her stroke fluid, and when she rolled her head from side to side to breathe, you could barely see her mouth open. “There is no excuse for a messy swimmer, any more than there is for a messy eater,” she told us. My mother judged people by how well they swam and whether they made her laugh or not.
    Spring Creek was not wide like the Garnet River or huge like the Gulf of Mexico or long like some lakes. It was just a small brown body of water, well suited to mothers and children.While the creek was perfectly safe, we were warned about the areas out of sight. Out where the creek curved, where it was too deep. Past where old logs divided the swimming area from a darker, deeper one. Alligators that could eat a kid whole lived out there. They waited for bad little children who disobeyed their mothers. They crawled into your dreams at night. They could eat you, they could eat your mother, they could pull the rug out from under you when you least expected it, and then gobble you whole before you knew it.
    “Even I can’t save yall from the alligators,” Mama used to say. “So don’t push your luck.”
    When Mama swam her laps—ten times around the circumference of the swimming hole—she made the creek seem larger than it was. I marveled at her solitude as she swam those laps. She called it her “swim around the world,” and I couldn’t wait until my own stroke was strong enough for me to follow in her wake. Mama