A day at the lake

Friends Sally and Teresa test the water temperature among Bosnian sprawled on the beach at Lake Borasko



I spent a day Sunday 6/25 that put me back 45 years or so to Brown's Beach on Lake Saratoga.

Our family didn't really have vacations but three or four times a summer we could count on a long day at Brown's Beach -- a lakeside picnic spot. We'd set down blankets on the grass and go into this lake that I remember as really brown, filled with seaweeds, muddy and kind of stinky. Our parents told us the lake was "working," meaning it was churning top to bottom in some kind of renewal good for fish but not exactly ascetic. And there were cigarette butts all over the grass and sand because -- it was 45 years ago before littering and smoking became taboo. As pre-teens my sisters and I hated these enforced family gatherings, except for the food we packed, the rides we were allowed to go on at dusk in a part nearby and the feel of a day out with the family having fun, which obviously I am still recalling a half-century later.

Lake Borasco is about 90 minutes from Sarajevo outside the famous furniture-making city of Konij and one of the few lakes open to swimming in Bosnia.

Make a cup of your hands and turn your fingers into mountains and your palm into a detergent turquoise lake and you got the setting. The moutains are wooded and lushly green after all the rain of this spring and the place was full of picnickers and swimmers.

A group of young men near the shore arrived with a guitar and a skinned lamb to barbecue. Another group on the rocky shore came packing a whole chicken, a machete and a grill. The sounds of laughing, singing, and blaring Bosnian music from radios played out over the afternoon. The water was warm, a surprise in that mountain setting and as we walked to the shore a big fat leopard frog plopped in front of us.

Sally, who threw a party the night before, brought fancy leftovers for lunch -- grapes, cheese with pesto sandwiches and a Mexican salad. And she also brought a raft to go floating in the lilly pads in the lake.

I opted to LIE IN THE SUN where I waxed nostalgia for my lost youth at Brown's Beach and Florida beaches. I ended up with a red nose and burned knees.