At the Lake House

Wind and the sound of wind— across the bay a chainsaw revs and stalls. I've come here to write, but instead I've been thinking about my father, who, in his last year, after his surgery, told my mother he wasn't sorry—that he'd cried when the other woman left him, that his time with her had made him happier than anything he'd ever done. And my mother, who'd cooked and cleaned for him all those years, cared for him after his heart attack, could not understand why he liked the other woman more than her, but he did. And she told me that after he died she never went to visit his grave—not once. You think you know them, these creatures robed in your parents' skins. Well, you don't. Any more than you know what the pines want from the wind, if the lake's content with this pale smear of sunset, if the loon calls for its mate, or for another.