Watery path
24 January 2011 12:43 PM Categories: Quotidian existence | Writing prompts
In Wilmington, Delaware, we lived near the Brandywine, a rocky creek surrounded by trees and parkland. This is where Kevin, my mother's boyfriend, found Louise, a shivering irish setter mix, where on my trips home from college, my mother, Kevin and I walked the dogs along the race where the mill used to be. In the fall, persimmon trees dropped their fruit and shook scarlet leaves. Winter exposed the muskrats. They swam from one side of the race to the other under thin sheets of ice, their bodies dense and quick. We discussed the voluptuousness of their fur, the fact that some people still ate muskrat, how Brandywine algae and chemicals would make the meat bitter.
There was Chestertown, the year and half in college and then dropping out of college, the walks by bobbing boats, the night Peter and I rode a tandem bike through sweet summer air across the Chester to his garden patch, the strolls along the river with my roommate Martha, our sob stories, our parental complaints, our barely post-adolescent struggles. Or J's family place across the lane from the Sugar Shack, the beauty of the creek, the ominous duck blind, the backfire of shotguns on November mornings. When I told him how beautiful it was, how I loved the tall trees along the driveway and the way the moon reflected off the water, he told me he had stopped noticing such things long ago.
College in Washington, DC wasn’t about the Potomac, it was about the place, the power, the buildings, the smooth marble and cool granite. I loved it all, lived in every quadrant but southeast, but left it for library school in Illinois. Champaign-Urbana turned out to be dry and featureless, flat and sparse. On deadly August nights, the thunder reverberated as it searched for a place to call home. My next-door neighbor beat his girlfriend with muffled thwacks and I, filled with women's studies courses and a strong sense of justice, called the cops. Nothing changed.
After graduation, my boyfriend and I moved to Columbus, Ohio, a city at the confluence of two rivers. We moved in the middle of a winter so frigid that we couldn't touch our bedroom walls comfortably without an intermediary: gloves, a thick blanket, the stretched woolen sleeves of a sweater. By spring I got my first library job in a building that overlooked the Scioto River. I can only picture the river in winter, the wind flying off the water's surface to slap me in the face as I walked to work from the Short North or from Old Towne East, the way the sun reflected pure light in the late afternoon. Boyfriend, then marriage, animals, a brick Victorian: it had all the trappings of a life, but my mind was on the East Coast.
We moved from Columbus to DC, from DC to a Takoma Park house near polluted Sligo Creek, where we walked our sheltie dog and had increasingly stressful conversations about my husband's bad work situation. His old job was still available and he took it, returning to the banks of the Scioto on the weekend of our second anniversary. Less than a year later, our marriage's dissolution pushed me back to Dupont Circle, where the brick buildings soothed and I could walk for hours contemplating, comforted by the flow of traffic. It was the flood from an upstairs neighbor's broken water heater, the gush that didn't stop for three days, that floated the cats and me across the Potomac to my new boyfriend's Alexandria apartment.
Years passed. We moved to Adams Morgan, within walking distance of two bridges. We ran along paths in Rock Creek Park, watched black-crowned night herons fish from the zoo grounds. We got married on a beach in Southern California against a backdrop of rocks and kite surfers, drove up the coast for a honeymoon. Two years later, the baby arrived. We stayed as long as we could in our one-bedroom apartment. Then, another move across the Potomac, one cold lonely winter in Alexandria scuffling through snow drifts, visiting National Airport with the boy to watch the planes take off when I couldn’t take another minute of being in that house.
Today I am in Berkeley, a 35-minute walk to the edge of the San Francisco Bay. We live in one of the cooler spots in the city, where the fog collects and the breezes whip off of chilled bay water. But I am not of the water anymore. Instead, I am beholden to the land, the way it contours. Gravity plants each step I take. I know the earth will shake someday, will rattle the bricks loose from the fireplace and crack the picture window in the living room. Perhaps the bay waters will rise and lap at the concrete slab out front.
When it happens, I won't hesitate. I'll improvise a boat and float away, letting the currents pull me where they wish.
Image of Brandywine Creek and bridge (fairly certain this is the Washington Street bridge, which is where Kevin found Louise) by tcd123usa.
From a old prompt: Where am I? Sometimes the water theme feels tired to me, but what can I say? It resonates. Looking forward to starting a new Round Robin soon.
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