USA

deborah.fries@worldnet.att.net

Summer House, Hika Bay

I knew something I wanted was out there, a summer house,
set just so against the eastern shore, long grass and wild trees
bending toward Benton Harbor, with bluffs and a beach and an
unbroken bay. Found it. That house came into the frame of our
windshield in the last miles of a random drive – stoic as a Shaker
chair, rising perfectly alone out of open space. It was the place
I would always need: cedar shakes, reaching deck, grazing Holsteins,
blue and white laundry flapping toward the whitecapped skin of Hika Bay.
A year later, four of us drove back in fog too thick to see the water
and found it abandoned, half-price, its land grant owner imprisoned, bullet
holes in the back door. We walked the eroding beach, waded through
rusted lawn furniture, saw a rosy carp lying beside uprooted raspberries.
Yet everyone wanted the place I had conjured: two couples whose marriages
would end, their children running off into a landscape of invasive, native beauty.
Ignoring the geomorphologist’s report, we moved in, with bathing suits
and towels and sling chairs, cutting back the wind-bent growth,
battling black flies, waiting for clear title. Even as we arrived,
I was leaving you and that house twelve feet from the slumping bluff.
Days away from the war years, I was waiting, in that strange August
when monarchs swarmed and a band of ice formed along the horizon.
Advised to be silent, to wait awhile longer in that world where we saw
rainbows almost every Sunday and the nights were too dark to sleep
and our clothes smelled of lemon oil and fish and wood smoke.
Vigilant. Ready to leave the only place I wanted.

© Copyright, Deborah Fries.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.