Bodies of Water
Dad used his hands to make things. Music stands and desks, adze and axe handles, balconies and cabinets, bread boxes and bird houses, a laddered library, frames for Bobbi's stained glass, a dollhouse, a sauna, a dock. Used his hands to make sonatas and concertos on a piano. Made me a wildflower press for high school Biology. Built stone walls of rocks we took from a scree slope in the mountains to terrace a garden. Made a long staircase with my grandpa, his dad, down to the lake. Spent a summer erecting a tall fence to thwart deer. And a thousand other things. I was two weeks old the first time he took me sailing. I grew up trying to absorb all the knowledge he could pass on. He taught me to read wind on water, telltales sewn into jibs, the signals transmitted through a tiller into fingertips. Especially when the moon was full, we’d sail at night on Coeur d’Alene Lake. The first time we went over to the coast and spent a couple weeks on the ocean, alive with tides, I gained a completely different take on the moon I thought I knew. I went back to landlocked Idaho with a changed understanding of lakes, too, no matter how long, deep, or windy they might be. The world was bigger than I thought, but reachable.
