AAA~What the Water Holds

I wake at five, as I always did,
but the loons sound different now.
Or perhaps it’s my ears that have changed.

Barefoot on the dock, I feel the cold of wet wood against my soles,
as I dreamed it would be, all those years in the city,
mourning what we’d sold.

The coffee tastes wrong in my old mug.

Twenty-seven rings on the porch rail
plus fifteen more I wasn’t here to make.
My grandmother would understand this strange arithmetic of return.

By noon, I’m swimming out to the rock
where our children learned to dive.

The water holds me like it always has, indifferent to my solitude.
I float, eyes closed, feeling how my body has forgotten
this specific buoyancy,
how it must learn again to trust.

The sugar maple still casts its golden afternoon light,
though the weathered chair sits empty.

I place his ashes there instead,
where three generations of our women once read their summer books.

My daughter, now thirty-two, watches from the kitchen window.
She drove me here, knowing I couldn’t face the road alone.

Evening finds me walking every room.

The new owners kept our pencil marks, those measured years of growth.
They’ve been kind, these strangers,
letting me return to scatter him where he was happiest in all his years.

The contracts were signed long ago.
Tomorrow, I’ll drive away again.

But tonight the loons call out their ancient question,
and I answer with the terrible gift of knowing
this is not the last time, but the wrong time, the broken time,
when I hear them from this square of Earth
without the one who made it home.

I close my eyes and breathe.

Pine pitch, lake water, old wood, no smoke from any fire.

He is everywhere and nowhere,
in the grain of the dock,
in the silence where his laugh should be.

I am one woman carrying two histories,
and only this moment to hold them both.