My mother is sweeping the woods. Crazy as it is, the sound fills my heart. She is right outside the log cabin walls and ready to be greeted and teased. We arrived late and she is preparing Birch Rock for our first glimpse of water through trees, of the loon with its baby in the bay.
The woods look fine now, but together we remember the summer that caterpillars ate up all the leaves of the forest canopy, how she felt it was her own life being nibbled away at so quietly. She brags that she’s been out in the laser already and reports on the song she sang on the lake for any early swimmers who might have been listening. Rake set down, her arms lift as she sings it for me—“Oh he’s out with Kate and Jane, then he’s off to sea again, Ship Ahoy ... the naughty boy.” The wind might die down, she says, “So go now. Enjoy yourself.”
My mother is eighty something, and I can barely keep up. I absorb her encouragement and scoot out onto the lake, tacking and looking back at the hillside I dream of in winter. The lake wraps its thick and thin horizon around me, a flowing green arm that comforts and never holds me too tightly.
Once in my confused twenties, I sat fuming on the big rock until my mother squatted beside me, respectfully ignoring the heavy air around me, and she said, “I used to watch you four from up here, your perfect limbs in the sunshine. And I thought how beautiful, how perfect ... and how disappointing that you’d have to grow up and grow warts and get ugly.” She smiles, brushes the path, and leaves an opening for me. With my own babies, I have remembered this moment — remembered that joy is also sadness, that our comings and our goings are one and the same. We show one another the path, saying, “Go now, enjoy yourself.”
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