just saying...

June 28 (Sara):
Every lock we go through, Dad has the same conversation with lazily contented boat-admirers or/and whoever’s helping us with the lines. It usually goes something like this:
“Hello!”
“Hey! Nice day, eh?”
“Yup. We’ve been lucky with the weather.”
“Where you from?”
“Boston.”
(grinning) “So how about those Bruins, eh?”
“Oh yeah, but the funny thing is—” (dramatic pause) “—there are more Canadians than Americans on the American team!”
(big, guttural chuckle) “Crazy, eh?”



June 29:
Nicest night yet. Steph and I sprinted off the dock and splashed into the cool relief of the lake. We shampooed each others’ hair, hoisting ourselves up by the lines that connect the boat to the swaying dock.
“Now, how are we gonna get out?” I asked Steph and myself, vainly attempting lazy acrobatics with the ropes and dock-sides as Steph scrubbed her face with slime-green soap.
“Da-ad!” I called.
No answer. Hmm. I looked around. Aha!
“We could just swim over there,” I realized aloud. And we did. (“Over there” being a serenely grassy spot we’d kneeled by earlier (before our run), admiring a tiny, exquisitely black-blue beetle perched on the fresh green petal of a weed.)
Our pink feet hoppingly hurried through pebbled grass and, once back by the Lucy III, stopped and stood exultingly, towards the ever-new wind, harmonizing, drying— solidifying from water to flesh.
Human again, we unzipped the Wendy Room and slipped into the homey aroma of spaghetti. Mmmmm.


June 30:
“Saraaaaa!”
“Wha…?” I look around groggily. “Oh!”
“Bye! Bye-bye!” Emily and Sydney sing, waving grinningly as their boat zooms by.
“Ahh!” Steph cries from downstairs where she’s doing her hair. “What’s going on?”
“Emily and Sydney!” I call back as their wake rocks our stomachs into churning roller-coaster glee.

We met those two sisters last night after Dad befriended their grandpa. Seeing Dad “making another friend” (he’s very social), Steph and I strolled over from where we’d been washing up in the lock’s fancy bathroom (As we were walking in, Steph pointed to the iconic male and female restroom figures and joked, “Who are those people?” In my exhausted exhilaration my mouth cried, “William and Kate!” Steph rolled her eyes as I sprinted in, calling “William!...Ew…William stinks…” “Kate smells better,” Steph noted, stepping into the girls’ bathroom.— and now the lavatory will forever be known as “William” (boys’) and “Kate” (girls’)…)to the dock where the two men stood by the darkening plum-hued water.



As we greeted the grandpa, shaking hands, a little, blonde-bobbed sprite skipped over, hugging the man’s arm and chortling, “Whenever Grandpa’s around women, I know I’ve gotta watch out.” Her voice was so beautifully, childishly musical, like an especially enthusiastic flute and her smile so large and joyfully façadeless that I asked her, “What’s your name?” “Sydney,” she replied, delighted by my plunge into conversation. After Steph and I introduced ourselves, Sydney pointed to a white power boat. “That’s our boat there,” she informed us proudly, “and,” she continued, indicating a taller girl in an aqua sweatshirt, wavy blonde hair, and red and white plaid pajama bottoms, “That’s my sister Emily.” “Hi,” Emily greeted us with a slightly hesitant smile. We introduced ourselves again, pointing to the far-off white sailboat with the green canvass and horizontal mast. And then they were telling us funny anecdotes about their crazy, rural lives; like the time Sydney fell on a beaver dam and the night Emily crawled through some sewage pipes with her cousins and Emily had thought a crocodile was snapping at her heels (Sydney announced self-contentedly that she had remained sanely behind on that particular adventure). When they asked me and Steph if we had any stories, we looked dumbfoundedly at each other and blamed our deteriorating adult brains for their failure to produce memories but really, in the city you don’t get into exciting conundrums like that. While they were climbing piles of logs and tumbling down ecstatically, we were propped up by pillows, staring dully at the TV. We are active for city-slickers (as my mom calls us), going to the gym, the skating rink, the art studio… but we’re always driving and any blunder is seen as an “inconvenience”, a “waste of time”. We’re constantly rushing, and so have no time to skip through mud puddles and go on twilight walks not for fitness but for no because at all. I’d like to live somewhere where there is no “why”, only the meandering thrill of living.

I want to feel like Iggy Pop does when he sings “I gotta lust for LIFE!”