Lake Whitney, TX: Receiving Memory as Healing

The lake rolls, and a distant boat’s attenuated wake sucks gently at the limestone shore.

The last tufts of cottonwood fluff drift in the stale summer breath. I fend off a sneeze with a scrunched nose.

Bluebells and button-bush cling in sere and burning sand, nodding to the opposing bluffs as if in supplication.

How stoic the thirsty junipers and live oaks, rooted in the hard, cracked soil!

How tired the hulking gar when arrow or hook ends its Triassic drifting in a quiet cove!

I slip bare feet into the shallows, the soft water surprisingly cool in the brutality of this Texas hear and hear memories speaking through the voices of the noisy titmouse and scissortail.

The 47-pound catfish—fried and plated, tasty culmination of a long life. My nine-year-old heart—too tender to consume the flesh of the skinned beast.

The mating Brown tarantulas swarming the lodge hosts’ exterior walls in late-afternoon sun.

Running trot lines across the inlets and baiting hooks with chicken liver and wads of clay-like blood bait.

Dropping salty peanuts in glass bottles of Big Red soda.

The round, loud, and always-kind lodge manager.

Love: my family’s care, a constant balm.

Suddenly, I’m wrenched back to my solitude and my loss of all the precious time with loved ones stolen from me, never to be recovered.

Finally, I understand why this place calls me relentlessly. It is not its beauty, although it is, as a friend described, magical. It is the ghosts: voices I can no longer hear but only imagine, faces only found in photographs, healing hugs barely recalled, Momma’s silk-soft hands, Dad’s horrible puns, and the comfort of older siblings who watched over me even in their youthful independence and rebellion.

Tears come unbidden and unbearable, followed quickly by rage that I tamp down. I can’t change the past. I can’t get back that which was taken in such selfishness.

I can return to this place.