Minnows

A poem about summer and stillness, plus a bit of reminiscing about the Fourth of July

When I was a child we celebrated the Fourth of July in two different ways depending on the calendar. I’ve told you before of the lake where I spent the month of July in a rented cabin. Rentals started on a Saturday each year. So if the Fourth landed earlier in the week, we would go to my Aunt and Uncle’s place in Portland on Munjoy Hill, the same working class neighborhood where my father and his siblings had grown up, now much gentrified, but still a lovely place to spend the Fourth.

Their house was just steps from Eastern Prom where the fireworks happen. The city closes the streets off earlier in the day so we’d arrive in the afternoon, my mother’s annual contribution to the holiday - a strawberry rhubarb pie - balanced on someone’s lap. We’d have a leisurely dinner, and throw many games of horse shoes in the yard. Sometimes the adults would play whist around the table on the porch.

I’ve never been a night owl, so when 9:00 pm came someone would have to wake me up for the fireworks. When I was still small enough, my Uncle would carry me down to the Prom, and when I woke up sufficiently, he would boost me up onto his shoulders to watch the show. (Photos don’t lie. My Uncle carried me pretty much everywhere until I was five years old, including up Bradbury Mountain. He would also lay on his stomach on the floor next to me to watch TV, chin propped on his hands, paddle me around endlessly in a canoe, and send me handmade birchbark Valentines. He was the world’s best uncle.) After the show, we’d walk back up to the house, where we’d eat pie while we waited for the traffic to clear out.

Years when we were already up at the lake, though, we did not go to the fireworks. My sister and I certainly asked. But our parents were adamant. “We just got here. We’re not leaving!” It wasn’t a long way to go. Maybe a 45-minute drive back to Portland. But it was unthinkable. The only acceptable reason to leave the lake, to go farther afield than the tiny grocery store, or the laundromat, was to return home to water the garden. This was always undertaken first thing in the morning, the goal being to be back by the time the sun was on the dock.

That phrase, “the sun is on the dock” became a source of childhood stress for me. It was so important to my parents to wring every bit of sunshine out of that month. A request to stop at the bakery on the way through town could be denied because “the sun is on the dock.” Lazing about in bed with a book too long would be challenged with the same words. We’d pull into the post office on the way back up to the lake, one of us girls sent in to collect the mail, always with that phrase called out to our backs lest we dawdle, “The sun is on the dock!”

Lack of Fourth of July fireworks aside, the days in the sun on the dock were wonderful. My parents may have been a little intense about preserving their time at the lake. But those long, lazy days, the sparkling water, the pine needles underfoot, those are some of my clearest sensory memories of childhood. Part of me preferred the Fourths spent on The Hill with relatives and crowds. The lake could feel lonely in comparison. But eventually my Uncle would turn up with his canoe and paddle me out to the islands, or across to the far shore, or anywhere else I asked him to take me.

The poem below came from a prompt provided by

Amber Tamblyn

last November on

Listening in the Dark with Amber Tamblyn

(The prompts she offers are always so full of inspiration and are generally accompanied by one of her beautiful poems. They are for paid subscribers only. It’s so worth it.) We were asked to think about ripples in our lives. I took it in a more literal direction than may have been intended, because the very first image that came to me was of my own feet dangling off the dock into the lake, sending concentric circles out across the water.

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Minnows

The toes on my childish feet
hanging off the dock, dangling
in the lake, so still, waiting to be kissed
by tiny minnows’ soft lips

Twitching, scattering the fish,
I sent ripples in all directions
that spread and faded until the 
stillness and the fish returned

I would sit like that for ages,
content with the impact of
my quiet presence and twitches,
until the angle of the sun shifted

hiding the minnows beneath 
a shimmering surface 
so I could only imagine
their kisses and their flight

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Thanks for being here, everyone. Happy Fourth of July to those of you from the U.S. It feels like a weighty observance to me this year. Wishing us all hope and purpose in the coming months.