Silver Lake Bible Camp 1971

You have to take a swim test to get a wristband that allows you to swim to the raft floating in the lake.  The raft is the cool place to be where boys push off girls and there is much splashing and laughter.  There is your new yellow bikini and the boy with the yellow hair.  So you take the swim test, dog paddling your heart out to the raft and back to shore, standing up in the shallows triumphant.  

Sorry, the lifeguard shrugs, dog paddle doesn’t count as swimming.  

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Beaver Island Vacation 1992

The four are all young – two children and two parents.  Hiking the trails, discovering each other in that way time apart does.  At night the mother makes up stories – the two children giving her characters and places and then off they go.  Then to dreams. In the warmth of the next afternoon the four go to the beach and the two children and the father spend hours creating sand castles.  Doorways and moats.  Towers surrounded by landscapes of stone and feather and driftwood.  The water is kind.  Until it is not.  The wind picks up the waves, and the father reaches for the tower to try to save it.  

He is that kind of person.  Trying to hold on to keep things together as sand slips through his fingers.  He does this even years later when the mother becomes wind and wild and crashes into his shore.

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Grandma Annie’s Funeral 1994

Grandma Annie had a thick German accent.  She was the only person I allowed to call me Ruthie – which sounded like Rootie.  Grandma Annie loved watching Wrestle Mania each Saturday afternoon.  Rootie, oaacchh, look at them my god da way dey twist and jump.  Grandma, I say, it’s not real.  Oaachhh just look at dem – come watch wit me.  And I do because I love this large woman.  

Now she is gone. My aunt paid for the best Catholic funeral.  Censers of incense. Chants and hymns and prayers.  The aspergillum sprinkles holy water over the   casket.  A little of the water gets on me.  The priest says that water is what carried Annie into the world and now the sacred waters will carry her to the next.  Rootie watch oaachh my god da way I twist and jump.  I watch and watch.  My brother hands me his handkerchief to wipe the water off my face.