The Near Drowning

I almost drowned when I was a little girl.
We lived in two rooms of a large building that is a working mill, having been evacuated from our city.
The mill has been there for a couple of hundred years and is, obviously, next to a stream. The stream is channeled apart and one part runs under the building to drive the machinery that moves the mill stones. There are access holes to the water for maintenance, and was used as a garbage disposal.
The millers also had land and livestock, fowl ran in the yard and on the water. Then it was time to butcher a couple of hoofed things and preserve meat. This was a huge job. A butcher was hired for the day and all hands were needed, including my mother and the bigger kids. We young ones were sent out to fend for ourselves, coming in to check on progress occasionally.

My version differs here from my sister's who, being older, thinks she remembers all thing accurately. I recall my sister picking up a piece of meat and squishing is through her fingers. The butcher saw her, shouted to her to put it down. He, with the bloody apron and large knife, advanced toward her. I backed up and dropped into the hole.

In my sister's version, mom, she and I were walking, without the butchering activities, across the space. She says that, as always, I wasn't paying attention and fell in. (She would never grab a kidney and fool with it!)

In any case I was in, and looking up I saw light through the murky, bloody water. Mother yanked me up and out. Quick thinking on her part, as the stream would have carried me away under the floor to come out near the big wheel maybe one hundred feet away.

I am still not fond of underwater swimming. Just let me float on top, I'll be happy.

P.S. I went back to the mill a few years ago. I chatted with the miller, who remembered my family, me. He had been a teen then. He let me look around, in spite of the fact that the mill is not a tourist destination. He gave me an update on all the people that I remembered and had cared about as a young child. I was fortunate to get "closure" on that chapter.
Ray was in high school then and had been with me. He enjoyed seeing the place of so many of my stories.