Memories

“….I am suddenly the skinny boy I was
splashing in the sandy shallows at the lake,
tossing water by the handscoop at my sister
sunning on the dock….”

American poet John Caddy wrote the above after having seen a goldfinch bathing in a spray of splashing water.

Triggered memories.

Sunrise, sunset, sunrise, sunset. Swiftly flow the days.

Last week the air was bitterly cold with snow almost to sea level. A week later I am walking through the sweet scented air of a blossoming coastal wattle bush profusely announcing its determination to bring spring into being.

Was it just seven days ago that winter was here? It doesn’t seem possible.

Was it forty seven years ago that I, like John Caddy, was in the sandy shallows of Indian Lake in northern Michigan splashing water at my brothers and sister? It doesn’t seem possible.

Half a world away and half a century in time distant from my childhood, I can both picture and feel myself fearlessly jumping three feet off the dock, inner tube beneath my butt, and triumphantly landing in the water. Brave.

“Look, mom!” “Look, dad!” “Watch me!”

Such an innocent time. For three months each summer, my mother made sure we kids left the city of Detroit and felt the pleasures (and importance) of a cabin in the forest at the edge of a lake. For three months each summer we swam daily, hiked daily and fished daily with bamboo poles and night crawlers (rowing out in the evening to our favourite fishing holes, mosquito chasers burning fore and aft). After dark, because the cabin had no TV, radio or telephone, we played cards or board games or hide-and-go-seek. One summer we learned how to crochet rugs.

If, as kids usually do, we asked for an outboard motor for the boat, my mother would simply say: “Why? You’ll see and hear more if you go slowly through the water by rowing. Besides, the noise will disturb the fish and birds.”

My mother took me deer hunting with bow and arrow. She taught me how to tell “north” by placing sticks in the ground and watching the sun’s shadow trace a directional path (just, in case, I ever got lost). She took me to secret groves in the forest and exclaimed how old and beautiful they were; lucky that the loggers had missed them.

She loved the natural environment and passed this love on to me.