If It Were July

My husband, who is not yet my husband, tells me in the morning while the light from the lake streams in through the big windows out front, that there are a lot of magpies this year. It strikes me because he is not one to notice these things, or to know the correct name for a bird outside the window. We operate at different speeds and his does not include bird watching. And also, because he is right, there are a lot of magpies this year.

We are at the cabin again for the summer and these weeks all bleed into one another like dye leeching from a cross stitch; their sameness and the smell of the hot dirt road out front and the bumps of the path and the cool lake water around my ankles while my son digs a hole and throws a rock in saying again and again, wa-wa wa-wa. There is always a bird in the distance or a small prop plane about to take off from the landing strip by the lake. You can hear the wind come down the mountain behind us and push its way through the trees and it sounds like a wave. You can hear it before you can feel it.

I walk down to the lake where the cicadas click and the algae blooms and the cotton floats down from the trees like snow. By late July everything is hanging on, but barely. We are either one moment away from everything we ever wanted or about to lose everything we have. The water line is dropping as reminder that summer is slipping through. I wade out into the lake and sink up to my neck, a chill that bites in a way that I like. I float on my back in the water while the sky is too bright to open my eyes and I pretend for just a second that I am someone else.

Last year at the end of the summer our mountain caught fire and it jumped the ridge line and nearly made it to our house. When I swim out into the lake I can look back at the shore and see the burn scar cutting through the trees. My neighbor said you can still go up there and find handfuls of morrel mushrooms in the ashy dirt; the cliched idea that something delicious can come from destruction. Cliche because it is true. I do not want to say it loud but I am afraid of something, or perhaps I am afraid of myself.

It has taken me all month to write this and the summer has gone to rot on the kitchen counter while I have done so. I am waiting for a fire to start, my son to wake, or phone call to change my life.

(*this last line is a tribute to Sandra Cisneros, A House On Mango Street.)

Image by Katch Silva