handprints outside in

When I was little my grandparents had a small, shingled cabin on the banks of the Connecticut River delta. The place was old and made noise and sat on low stilts to avoid occasional flood damage, or the whole house washing down the river during storm season. It had a rickety old deck and big windows looking out from the window seat of the den, where I’d curl up and sleep with a blanket that smelled like my grandfather when I spent whole weekends there.

Outside there was no yard, just dirt, which turned to mucky, muddy silt as you walked closer to the edge of the water. There were mussels and clams burrowed deep under the mud, and we’d go around with our pants rolled up and pluck them out and bring them back in sacks for shelling.

Just beyond their property were long narrow trails between high thick reeds on either side, and I’d always wander in and out of them trying to guess where I’d eventually land. Sometimes in town, sometimes out at the ocean. It was almost always misty and gray out, and even when the sun was shining everything felt damp and soggy, the colonial gray shingles of that place old and browned with 60 years of fishing-town residue.

They had a dock down at the water, with a small wooden boat tied in and some uneasy pier posts that moved in heavy wind. The water was always dull and dark and slow. Lazy. I always wondered why it wasn’t more interested in the ocean. There were sometimes jellyfish and snakes, sometimes lightning storms that struck trees along the beds. Being at the mouth, the river swelled a lot. I woke up one morning on that window seat and something felt strange. The fog was thick and I couldn’t see much out the big window, so I pressed my nose against it and looked down over the sill. Water. All around. It was pushing up under the house, lapping up against the stilts and flooring. My heart skipped, it felt like we were floating.

We weren’t, but the water turned out to be more than 3 feet deep out there and moving swiftly, so we wound up trapped in the house and monitoring the floors all the rest of the day and well into the night, with candles to see by and rags for the worn corners; my grandma keeping one eye on me, and one eye on that door. Despite wanting to, I was never allowed to stay with them more than a few days a month, my mom insisting I was too exhausting to keep track of.

All of this a good 23 or so years ago now, and I haven’t thought about that place in so long. But after laying and closing my eyes for a few minutes earlier tonight, I opened them again and there it all was. Without an explanation. All I could see was the water.

Posted by tee in de la vida
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