Still There

I went to Governor's Island at "the Lake" in New Hampshire. And if you've ever been there, you know what "the Lake" is. Nope, not gonna say.

Judy and I have spent all but seven birthdays--fifty birthdays--of hers together at her Adirondack-style camp. From her deep, dark front porch, we spend hours looking at the Sandwich and Ossipee Mountains. We listen to the lake sounds. For instance, water on rocks in the morning sounds a bit hollow. It's as if the rocks gather substance throughout the day, simply from the waves that hit. At night, the sounds are more muffled. We wait for the loons. They are rarer now on the Lake, at least in our area. Too much boat chop.

We are ten days apart, Judy and I. Our parents were best friends, and we spent our summers running between our little cottage and her camp. I admit it; her place was closer to the beach, so mostly I was at her place. On rainy days, however, or on afternoons when we just had had enough of the beach, we'd play hide and seek at my place. You'd be surprised how many crannies can hide a small child in a cottage of a thousand square feet. We built card houses out of about six incomplete card decks. Her dad was in the Reserves and brought us mess kits, so we were soldiers. There was a seventeenth century cemetery sort of near my place. The ruins of the British Governor's mansion from colonial times.

Judy and I go back to roots, and all other people from that far back in my life are gone. We sit. We read. We reminisce. We dream and say nothing, but know we have spoken volumes to each other's hearts. She is my other sister, and was before my blood sister died. I am so lucky.

It rained at some point every day but one. The temperature never topped seventy. The first time I went swimming, on my first FULL day there, it was sunny-ish in the morning, and I lasted twenty minutes and got out before my teeth chattered. I warmed up and then helped with some projects until my legs gave out, as is their custom. I read four books, the rain was so complete. It was too damp to paint because the paints would not have dried. We ate HUGE lobsters on the fourth, celebrating a day early, the first installment of her birthday. We compared gardens, the five who gathered, talked about birds and trees and remembered the beach of childhood.

Where now there is lawn, once there were white sand and white pines whose boughs scraped the water. We counted backwards from a thousand, Judy, my brother Jack, Judy's little brother Pete, and I--to punish parents who made us wait to swim after lunch. We had a gang of four one summer, Pickle-Lily Dinah-Sewer... based on various distortions of middle and last names. We four raided the old grouch's blueberry patch at the top of the island. We made half the population ill because we decided to dive for freshwater clams and stuff them as a "treat." We were kicked out of kitchens and off property. We rowed to Timber Island, got stung, then rowed back--in a leaky metal boat. Got caught in a thunderstorm in that boat and were towed home by the Lake patrol. We were grounded for a week, but I believe were given a reprieve because we were far too hard to keep home. We'd scream "OH. Sweet PEA. Wontcha dance with me!" while walking in the middle of the road, or Little Red Riding Hood, or Wild Thing. We were imaginative, mischievous, noisy, and silly, and pains in the butt.

We were children as very few children get to be. Absolutely free. Absolutely safe.

On the other day of sun, I was in the water by seven; this time I did my deep water exercises for over half an hour. I watched Mount Washington appear from behind the other ranges. I walked up to the camp, lips blue, smiling and teeth chattering. I could not get warm.

Judy said, "Why did you go into that freezing lake again and stay so long?"

"Because it was there."

"No, because you are you."

"Same thing." We smiled and I happily spent most of the rest of the day wrapped in a down comforter or sitting in the patch of afternoon sun that moved along the bits of half-hearted lawn between porch and water. You had to move your chair every fifteen minutes.

Twenty years ago, for her birthday I wrote this.

Lake Fragments ©1989
Finally, I learned the Lake trees;
White and black birch,
Beech, white pine and hemlock.
And I learned about putting in docks
And why pine forests have clean floors.
You taught me.
This does not change the magic, though,
It just puts you at its center.
But, then, you always were.

ii
The beach has slipped away
As man-sown grass encroaches.
It hides, embraced by the Lake, safe
Until men lose interest in mowing.
Then it will return,
The Lake's shining gift to the Island.

iii
Damn these holiday boats
Buzzing and groaning from one end to the other.
Churning the surface, they leave a slick
Until the Lake reeks
Of old rags in my grandpa's garage.
Yet tomorrow -- tomorrow at dawn,
When I am two hundred miles away --
The Lake will breathe silent again,
And will smell once again like peace.

iv
Midday in August
Cicada heat jams the air,
Even the Lake can't breathe.
The buzz saws rip the day
And three more birches fall.

All the same, next morning,
In the rising mists of dawn
The Lake will waken, smiling.
And still the loons will call,
And still the Lake will answer.

I go every year, just like some bird flying to its nesting spot. My grandparents' cottage has been razed and rebuilt three times. The home I grew up in has had so many remodels, I barely know it. My two brothers, my sister, my parents, grandparents--gone. Judy's parents gone. We remain for now. We go to one another a few times throughout the year. We talk on the phone.

But every July I fly to my home in New Hampshire. I sit in the presence of the little eight-year-old's dearest companion, content. I know nothing of water temperatures and reason. I must go into the water and sing to the mountains that never laugh at my aging, over-large and semi-crippled body. I tell them my stories while I work muscles that do not ache in the water. I cry. I laugh. I swim. I helicopter. I porpoise. I remember two giant fathers holding their breaths and diving in from the opposite end of the beach; Judy and I wait in breathless, almost fearful anticipation. I feel her father's giant hands cup me from below and launch me HIGH into the air, and a I fly, then land like a goony bird, butt first, sliding across the water briefly, before I sink -- and I hear Judy beside me, launched from my father's long-fingered catapult. I leap up and then submerge, for the joy in the memories and in the moment. We meet one another's eyes and the pains and ecstasies of fifty-seven years need no words.

We remain together, needing only these few days in each other's company to strengthen a bond as deep and as far reaching as the roots of the century-old trees around the camp. Our grandmothers were friends in their gardens. We have plantings from their rhythms as well. Plantings from our mothers' gardens. Memories of each other's fathers' rumbling voices in chests against which we lay. This is not vacation with her. It is tilling my soil and fertilizing my roots. It is the knowledge of home in the bones.

***

Judy has leukemia... not a treatable kind. In the miracle she has always been, after eight years, she still remains asymptomatic. She remains the strong, gentle, quiet Jude. I remain the chatterbox, silly, gentle, Jet.

Every July, I run to the Lake and jump in. Why? Because it's still there.
Every July, we aim our souls toward each other and jump in. Why? Because we're still there.

...Together