Bodies of Water
Jeremy Pataky Jeremy Pataky

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.

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