After Selling Your Lake House
Another Lesson in the Lesser Miracles
Day One
Empty Pedestals
Hijrah
Laundry
On Shrugging
The Knock
The Strand at Lough Beg
The Sudden Ocean
To the Howling and Back
Toward the Pith
Truth
Walking Down
We Sit in the Red Glider These Late Summer Evenings
After Selling Your Lake House
Merna Dyer Skinner
You’re sure, after your child drowns,
you will never return—yet, from across the lake,
you watch the house,
once yours. Early mornings
you walk the road—approach the screen porch
close enough to smell their coffee percolating,
hear the crack and whisk of eggs, sizzling
slabs of bacon hot on their griddle.
You want no one to notice as you listen
to the banter between mother, the children, their father—
his laughter rolls across the lake,
reviving memories of your husband in this cottage,
your daily patterns recreated now
by strangers. You stand alone resuscitating
summer days filled with syncopated sounds
of the screen door slamming as your sons run
in and out—you recall bonfires, fireflies,
sunburned arms. Most afternoons now
you watch their kids sprint to the lake,
dive off the dock—
as their heads bob to the surface, you count.