Of a Life Once Lived
June 20th 2023
In the summertime, we stayed in a house along the coast of Lake Michigan. Here, we spent our days frolicking through the sand and in the warm lakewater. We often laughed until we cried and we lost track of time. We were young then.
I remember an afternoon, when we dragged the old canoe off of the deck and down through the dune grass into the water. We climbed in, bringing along nothing but a bottle of water and the clothes on our backs.
We paddled under the hot sun, some three hundred yards from the shoreline. We observed seagulls diving around us, catching minnows and young bass just below the surface of the lake. Small, wispy clouds would come and go; a rest from the rays that shown down around us and upon our skin. We were cooled by an occasional breeze.
We continued for quite some time before we realized that, along the shoreline, the homes were no longer visible, and we were met with a distant woodland view. The National Forest lined this part of the lake, and apart from the squawks of seagulls, the only sounds we noticed were those of the paddles cutting through the soft waves.
We laughed and chatted for awhile but eventually we found ourselves quiet and still.
Peering over the edge of the canoe, I noticed that we were floating just above limestone bedrock and large Petoskey stones that decorated the floor beneath us. Northern Pike swam around us, the sun glinting off of their backs and tails. They were neither calm nor afraid of our presence, and they swam in comfortable solitude.
When we pulled up to the beach, we were met with a wall of evergreen trees. As we tiptoed through the rocky sand, I felt tiny in the site that I stood and yet, I was reassured by the way the world held me in this place.
We sat for a while, side-by-side. We skipped stones. We watched as sandpipers picked at the corpses of crayfish, as gentle waves brought them ashore. We laughed at each other, and we embraced one another. We were wildly unafraid.
The sun dipped low in the sky and, unaware of time or space, we climbed into the canoe and pushed off of the shore. I turned around and bid farewell to the untouched peace of the trees.
The sun and dusk converged, and soon a darkness overcame us. Our only guide was the North Star, until soon, light shining through the a-frame window of the home came into view. We paddled quietly, water rippling around us and lapping at the edge of the canoe. The bow scraped the sand as we landed, and we stepped into the shallow water. We bounded up the walkway, our skin softened by the lake water and tanned by the summer sun. We were young then, and nothing mattered but the trees and the lake and the sand between our toes.
