Lake Perch and Swimming

20 July 2017

            Yesterday I swam at Plage Bellerive, just below Lausanne, for more than an hour. The air was hot, the water refreshing. I stayed in so long that my legs and shoulders felt cold, especially on the air-conditioned bus back up the hill.

            In the evening we took a bus to Lutry, on the outskirts of the city, still on the lake, for a special dinner.  We were celebrating our 33rd wedding anniversary, a few months late. The restaurant, Café de la Poste, is famous for its lake perch. There was some confusion, because there must be a thousand Cafes de la Poste in French speaking countries. There are definitely two on the shores of Lac Leman, specializing in lake perch, the one we reserved being in Cully not Lutry. Although the Lutry one was booked up, the accommodated us for the first service. 

The view of France from Lutry.

            Preceded by salad and a course of spinach and morels, the perch did not disappoint. It brought back the memory of a summer in northern Wisconsin. Fishing from a sailboat moored near the dock, I caught 21 perch. Did my grandmother cook them for us?

Lake Perch-actually from Germany, not Lac Leman or Plum Lake.

           

            That summer, my mother and sister and I took the train, which then went as far as Rhinelander, but now doesn’t run at all. My mother had spent summers there at Plum Lake.  Before the war she was engaged to a young man whose summer home was just along the shore. His family still summered there, and had a slot machine in their living room, which I adored.

Where was my father? With his polio-lamed leg, he could not have managed the descent to the lake, and he didn’t play golf. He must have stayed back east.

That summer I learned how to make what we called winter gardens. in small jars, collecting mosses, ferns and small conifers from the woods.