In Possession (Minnesota)

Something almost Flemish about that water, a golden brown but clear into its depths, the plank-ends of the dock a fading gray beside it, and a boat moored at the end; something, it seems to me in looking back, about a murky bullhead on a stringer, one of those rope ones you can hardly see, so that the fish appeared to scull in place; something (the details start to widen now) about white wooden clapboards on the side of that inn or tavern where my dad had stopped, a neon beer sign staring out through glass— late in the afternoon, I drinking deep of everything I saw, now mine to keep.