So you filled your hands

I lied about not being able to go on. I took a lesson from my improv: I was overthinking it.

This is all true.

* * *

Here's what I always remember about Dow Lake: the mud. The sludge by the reeds, away from the beach where we weren't allowed to go, because it was all goose droppings. There were always flocks of Canada geese at Dow Lake, and you were always aware of them, and interested and curious, and wary. Dow Lake was one of the only beaches in my life for a very long time. We tended toward cold, rocky beaches on our vacations: Seattle, Chatauqua, Kelly's Island. When I got older we went on cruises in the winter or in March: those beaches hardly seemed like the same thing.

I remember being on the beach in Vancouver, earnestly collecting stones and pebbles and shells in a shoebox, and when we got back to the hotel they had all dried off and just looked dull and gray and dirty. I still have them. The box sat in a shelf overlooking my bed for many years. It was when they were wet they were so special. I remember the tiny shells I collected on the beach at Lake Erie, small and delicate enough that they fit on the very tips of your fingers. I remember vividly the abalone shells at Lake Chatauqua: broken ones and whole ones and ones in which clams had drilled through. You could usually get that scythe of shell along the edge, but the real find was a whole one, or even just bits still joined by a hinge. They smelled terrible when they dried, and I think I (or my mother) was forced to clean them with vinegar before I was allowed to keep them.

Chatauqua was incredible: it was a small (and gated) vacation community. I had my bike, an allowance for using at the nickel-and-dime candy store, art classes, the day camp ("Weeee're the Girls Club — KILL THE BOYS CLUB!" as part of the song we sang lustily back and forth every morning) — I had absolute freedom. I was 7 and 8 years old. I had my friend Amanda from near Pittsburgh. I remember it was the only place we used the bike rack on our car. I would sit in the back seat and watch the spokes on my wheels spin. I had the little neon-colored plastic beads that clipped onto the spokes, and they clattered all those hundreds of miles through Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and New York.

We have pictures of me in Seattle, mop of curls untamable and unbrushable, fascinated by the long shadows I'm casting on Alki Beach. When I went back, much older, I think I remembered being there. Those photos are kept in a small book of my dad's most prized pictures, his favorites. Over the past year and a half I've really learned how much I love my dad, and I know he knows but someday I'm going to figure out how to tell him.

It was always my dad who took me swimming. It was what we did in the summer when I was little, Dow Lake ("the lake") or the city pool. He was popular: he was the dad who would pick kids up in the deep end and lift them high and toss them in — hurl them. I remember long hours at Dow Lake, when the light grew gold and pink and peach and bruised purple, and the hills grew dark and I had shrieked and laughed myself into exhaustion, even if I wouldn't call it that. I think of me, skinny, scrawny, tall girl-child, hair plastered to my head and neck, a towel (an old one, from the '70s or early '80s, which belonged to an older sister) wrapped around my shoulders, my knees peeking out at the bottom, me barefoot, bare wet feet on the concrete, climbing into the car, circling around the parking lot, seeing the spot where they found a dismembered lady in an oil drum 20 years before, climbing up the steep rise past the entrance to the hiking trail, passing by the lake as the sun set behind the hills, past the New Deal bridges and camping tables and Canada geese and muddy, stinky cattails, thinking about dinner and seeing Mom and never realizing that Dow Lake hadn't always been there, just as it was and just as we, all of us that age, always loved it.