It was a 2000's. I was 14 years old. July was full summer month, it was hot! I spent all my childhood on the rivers, because our region has already three large rivers: the Sukhona, the Yug and the Northern Dvina. One day I've been  discussing places  with friends in the courtyard where we can swim  fun and one of them told about an unusual place on the river Northern Dvina. We immediately agreed to go there in the morning. But one friend who told us about this place could not go with us, but only put on the sheet of paper an approximate scheme of travel. In the morning, as expected, we take our bicycles together with a friend and went to look for this mysterious place. The first once was unsuccessful and we lost our way, never getting to the point we needed. I did not know the neighborhood of the city very well yet.

The next day the third friend, who talked us about the place and who knew the way, went with us. Yeeah! Have arrived! It was the usual bank of the river of the Northern Dvina with fields, willow and sandy steep shore, but suddenly an oasis appears on the way, that is, in the middle of an ordinary green field and a shore there is a bay with sand and small lakes, sandy braids.
https://pp.userapi.com/c11251/u22662366/124521196/y_86f02a4b.jpg

First, it was a place of amazing beauty. The sand was so clean and level, and the lakes are small, deep, varied in shape, with clear and warm water, like steamed milk! I fell in love with this place at first sight. It was simply a pleasure to swim there. We went there almost every day, took with you food, water and splashed all day in these lakes. The place is called "lakes". It would seem, it's just a shallowed small bay on the river, in which small puddles formed.
https://pp.userapi.com/c4157/u22662366/124521196/y_7c340c61.jpg

https://pp.userapi.com/c11251/u22662366/124521196/y_ad0c81e1.jpg

Summer ended quickly, as it usually happens. There are memories of this place. I even had time to go by car with my parents and relatives to this place and they also liked it. I also forgot to mention that I kept a diary at that time, wrote down trips and various impressions there - "lakes" were in the top! I kept the diary on my own code so only I could read it! I still read this code as in Russian and write on it also, it even as my own language has become. Here's a feature I have about this nobody knew.
https://pp.userapi.com/c11251/u22662366/124521196/y_7905dd8f.jpg

Winter was coming to an end, soon spring, and then summer and again on the lakes!!! Constantly imagined how I would go there again - in fact this is an ideal and safe place for swimming. No sooner had the warm May days come, as we came to this place of all courtyard by bicycles. There is still a lot of water in the river and this bay turned out almost entirely in the water. It did not bother us to swim, because we brought a tube from Kamaz wheel (russian truck) and floated on it. The water gradually descended and sand was again exposed in the bay, forming small ponds. Latest form and location of their very changed.
https://pp.userapi.com/c9872/u22662366/124521196/y_2092eb5d.jpg

https://pp.userapi.com/c5901/u22662366/124521196/y_ec5572ea.jpg

Time passed, every summer we went there by bicycle. Then we got the driver's licenses and started to drive cars. But the place is as if alive - every year it changed its configuration. Lakes changed their shape, location. One year Lakes was a lot of small lakes, but another year it turned out one or two large. Friends grew older, lazier, no one wanted to go there any more - far away and not always a good road. And I did not stop to visit this place! I felt comfortable there, calmly, remembering the day when I first discovered "lakes" for myself.
https://pp.userapi.com/c9872/u22662366/124521196/y_bd5b3e52.jpg

https://pp.userapi.com/c303415/v303415366/2a6b/HAe-ELNieMA.jpg

The place changed with the years, but it did not change for the better. Became less water, became overgrown with grass and willow. For 10 years since its discovery by me, there have appeared many willow bushes, dried up all the lakes...
https://pp.userapi.com/c637224/v637224865/4af6c/PEYWlkzt-5E.jpg

This year I visited the "lakes" not so long ago - it's sad to look at how the most favorite place of childhood simply disappeared. Impenetrable willow bushes, grass to the waist and one single puddle and a half meters in diameter. On bathing is no longer a question! How a person dies, so anything can die and even a place. For me  there are no more "lakes", although every year I return again and again in the hope that something has changed for the better. But there only more bushes become.
https://pp.userapi.com/c637224/v637224865/4afbc/M7-dVHOCamY.jpg

Photos from the satellite from different sites.
The shallow bay.
https://pp.userapi.com/c836432/v836432027/60669/_Xe7XvUXGds.jpg

The bay without water.
https://pp.userapi.com/c836432/v836432027/60672/57oEQPX5yHQ.jpg

Overgrown bay.
https://pp.userapi.com/c836432/v836432027/6067b/yFJyoDLYGKo.jpg

Although the place has long lost its former view, I still feel pacification while I was there. I'm attracted there like a magnet. And even when nostalgia rushes, I reread the entries from the diary and as if immersed in that carefree summer time and on the soul becomes warm, though a bit sad.
The diary is now another place where I feel calm and peaceful. Only there is preserved that time and those "lakes", which no longer exist. And the photographs of that place are now historical and documentary images of nature.