The Lake Days

The yellow-haired girl eschews todays, yesterdays, and last weeks. She prefers this days and the other days. And when she speaks of that difficult-to-wait-for future, she speaks of the next days. Some days, of course, get their proper due: Her birthday, for instance, and Christmas. But even more than birthdays and Christmases, she speaks of the Lake Days. These are halcyon days: Summer evenings at the lake. Riotous family days.

In winter, she hides her bathing suits under her clothes as she dresses, and she comes out of her room and asks when the Lake Days will come. Their absence weighs on her.

She doesn't feel the rocky beach beneath her quick, sturdy feet that so torment me. She doesn't see the cloudy water that makes me wonder about the safety of swimming in this dammed-up river. She doesn't feel the unrelenting heat and the restlessness her father feels to leave for a more air-conditioned country. She only wants it to be the days when she only wants it to be now, this day.

Oh for the Lake Days, when one casts off the too-fittedness of modernity and clothes oneself with water, buoyed up and released. There is new life in that brown river, swept down this day.