During the scorching months of a Texas summer, there's nothing quite so refreshing as playing in the water or at its edge. Wilma Bunton of Houston lived for five years in Galveston as a child.

We would go to the beach and we called it bathing. My aunt brought her bathing suit. It was one of those old fashioned, looked like a short skirt. And had white, three rows of white braids around the bottom, it came just below her knees. She had black stockings that went up above her knees and bloomers around her.

Doesn't sound real comfortable. No, she had bathing shoes on. And then she had a bathing cap, as it was called, that looked like a dust cap. And if she had fallen down in the water, we wouldn't have been able to save her. But the ladies at that time didn't swim. They even had puff sleeves, of all things. So that that would fill up with water, too.

But we'd go down and we'd beach comb. Early in the morning it's easy to find the shells and you can even find the sand dollars that are not broken. If you pick them up carefully, you can have the whole sand dollars. So we'd beach comb a while and then we'd bathe a while. Then the water made us so hungry till we couldn't wait to get home and get a bath.

My mother always had a good breakfast for us. Martha Howe of Waco remembers her summers at Oak Point, or Lacey Point, on the Old Lake Waco. Everybody loved sailing. My father went to Culver and, uh, was in the, in the Naval School, and, uh, Papa bought the boys a sailboat, and then Papa, um, also bought them a wooden boat.

And so they water skied and then over on the town side, that would be the east side. Papa had put pea gravel out into the lake so that you wouldn't get that old squishy mud between your toes. And I remember, I was in diapers and we would swim there. And it had big cottonwood trees all around it so it was shady and it was wonderful.

It was kind of... Like a little beach, but it was with Lake Waco water and, uh, daddy would teach, taught us how to swim there. We had piers out into the lake. We had a wonderful person that worked for us named Sherman. He would fish on one of the piers. So we called it Sherman's pier, but we would swim from the pier and we had a canoe and we had a speed boat.

And so, yeah, we, we definitely took advantage of it, but that was when the lake was small. Texas offers 15 major rivers, more than 150 lakes, and a gulf coast to consider for summer activities. The Texas Parks and Wildlife website provides recreation suggestions and safety tips for these locations at tpwd.state. tx. us.

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