Nonfiction by Tracey Ciccone Edelist
I am floating on top of a smooth blue sky with dappled clouds that break apart with each dip of the paddle. When the wind picks up, the sky in the lake becomes partially obstructed by privacy glass ripples, obscuring both sky above and underwater life below. Gliding further south, the ripples swell, and now I’m riding dark molten silver waves, the paddleboard gently rocking across the undulating liquid metal. I expect the paddle to drip silver-plated out of the water, but the splashes on my feet are clear and wet. Entering a small bay where the sun peeks through tree canopies, the water becomes like an oil spill, smooth and slick iridescence. I listen to the rustle of the trees as blue jays flit from branch to branch just above the water, breathing in the earthy smell of the damp bank and the leaves lying in varying layers of decomposition on the forest floor. As I drift away from the shoreline, the faint hint of a bonfire wafts through the air and I see a wispy plume of white smoke rising from a cottage clearing across the lake.
Sitting on the silver waves ahead, I see the young loon I’ve watched grow all summer, enjoying an independent swim. The sun reflects brightly off her long beak, not yet having turned black. She startles when she sees me and dives underwater. When she pops back up seconds later, she’s still close. She is almost fully grown, but her feathers haven’t changed from baby gray to the signature black and white adult markings, and she hasn’t yet earned her white necklace. She disappears again and I wait for her to surface. One minute, then two minutes.
Just as I’m wondering where mama loon could be, she swiftly swims to the place from which her loonlet has disappeared. Mama dunks her head below the water’s surface, searching the dark depths for her chick. She raises her head back up to scan across the lake, calls out loudly, and dunks again. I too continue scanning the lake. At last, the chick appears a few feet away and mama and baby swim quickly toward one another, baby bumping up against mama’s breast. The loonlet makes herself as small as she can on top of the water, scrunching her body down close to the surface near mama, hoping I can’t see her, but I can.
I remember how our youngest daughter took a few weeks after birth to unfurl her body from the position she held in my uterus. Born a couple weeks early, I imagined she’d rather be back in her confined amniotic home, riding the waves of my body, than out here in the open where air hit her skin and filled her lungs, and where she had to learn to feed herself from my breast. She wailed to be held at all times, heart to heart, eyes pinched shut, in protest against the vastness of this outside world. Holding her tiny compact body with curved back, arms and legs folded and tucked in tightly toward her center, was like holding a roly-poly hedgehog curled in on itself. We called her Scrunchie, until she began to relax her legs and straighten out her backbone.
Now she stands taller than me, straight-spined, long arms and legs swinging freely in the world she explores on her own. I find solace on the lake, and call her to me when she strays too far for too long.
Tracey Ciccone Edelist has a PhD in social justice education and is a critical disability studies researcher and educator. She had a previous career as a speech-language pathologist, and then as a fine chocolate entrepreneur. Now, she’s making sense of life through creative nonfiction.
