Late Afternoon on Onota Lake

I wake with it in the morning as I swallow fish oil pills. I meet it while filling out financial aid forms for my college-aged son. It follows me driving to the post office to mail the electric bill or waiting in line to buy Greek yogurt at Whole Foods. It is there in the rear view mirror of my heart, as I rise at three in the morning, padding to the bathroom to down a fistful of homeopathic sleeping pills, as I pull the covers over my head, hoping they will rock me to sleep. I imagine placing it under the bed, letting it remain with the box of old yearbooks and yellowing obituaries.  

But the mind refuses to be cajoled. The image will not let me go. It starts gently, with nearly inaudible softness, like the opening bars of Fur Elise. It moves outward toward a nearly still body of water, a lake named Onota. It pools wider to include a moment in time, four o’clock on an early June afternoon when the din from the motor boats and jet skis has died down, when the sun is lower above the trees on the far shore, but there is still plenty of warmth and daylight. This is the hour when he might have hauled out the scull to row it to Appletree Point or settled in one of the paint-chipped Adirondack chairs, bare feet resting against pine needles, and finished the Times’ crossword puzzle, nursing a cup of black coffee and waiting until five when he might replace it with a glass of Chardonnay.

But the mind is nothing but a master of legerdemain because these images are buried deep in the past like arrowheads, and on this late afternoon in June in two thousand and fourteen, he is no longer anything resembling the man in the photographs on the memorial table beneath the white tent, he is a collection of bone and ash, and I am not his twice-married sixty-year-old daughter, to whom he once said kind or cruel things, I am a solitary figure among others, sister, brother, nephews, grandchildren, each of us taking a handful of ashes and walking silently to the water’s edge and flinging it among the muddy leaves and mating dragonflies…  

My hands are dusty, clay-y with him as I rub them together, brush them off while walking back up the steep, root-thick path to the cabin and parking lot. I have let him go, consigned him to the waters of Onota Lake, where he will travel southeastward to mingle with the Housatonic River and southward again 149 miles to Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean.

I have let him go. I do not want to let him go.

Weeks later, I learn that Onota is a Mohican word that means deep blue.

It is a small thing, a clue in one of his crossword puzzles, but for now it is enough.  

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