A real clusterfuck of thinking…
Hurrying from one thing to another, I detour to my favorite swimming pond, under these overcast skies. A woman and a little girl are swimming. There’s no one else around, and the woman and I chat about the fish nibbling our toes. The girl sits on a floatie shaped like a chocolate ice cream cone and looks skeptically at us, as if her mother and I might be making up everything. Maybe, in truth, our toes are bleeding from fish fangs. The child is taking no chances. She leans back on the floatie and stares up at the sky. Her mother gently pushes her from shore.
I swim out.
My head is jammed with the conversation I just had over Pad Thai, three of us women, about writing and Vermont and friendships, about money, of course, always about money, how money winds into decisions we make. These are old conversations, worked out in new ways. As I drift out in the cold water, I keep thinking about all the material I’ve been reading about rivers and history, about farming and logging hands on the land, 100, 200 years ago, how what made sense then (sense? perhaps even seemed downright innovative, bordering darn smart) has piled up over these generations of rivers, now dredged too deep, the roads and the towns built far too near.
Because my mind works in metaphors, I keep thinking how years pile up mistakes, one after another, a real clusterfuck of thinking. There’s no one else around in the water save for me and the mother and girl. They’re both lying on their backs on the ice cream floatie now, circling around, the mother’s heels trailing in the water. All those summer days I spent at the beach with my daughters, with plastic shovels and buckets, with the sleeves of red cups that I used at the farmers’ market back in the days when I sold homemade root beer floats, $2.75 per cup…. The kids are now all (mostly) grownup, as happens. Maybe those years were nothing more than a light way to pass the days, insubstantial as dreams.
I swim out as far as I can bear in the cold water. When I return, the beach is empty. Clouds have pushed down low, and the sand is clammy. On my short walk back, two bikers ask me for directions. Go west, I advise. That’s the way out of here.
