Rip Tide, and: Eat Your Plate

Rip Tide

I swim, my arms scooping the water, my body moving sideways. My legs kick, and every third stroke, I turn my head to breathe, alternating right, to left, then right again. It is like a dance, feeling the rhythm of the waves, a force so big. I have learned to respect it.

The water is murky. Looking in, I see green and brown. The lake is enormous. I try to spot where I am: glancing, when I’m up to breathe, I see nothing but water to my left, and when I breathe to my right, I see a gray wall far off in the distance.

I stop and try to stand, but I feel no surface. I tread, and as the waves come, I try to ride, rising with the big ones. I see the wall, far down from where I started. I started by the rocks, where I left my guy sitting on a lawn chair with my dog on a leash. The wall is far, the shore further from where I had expected. My Garmin says I haven’t swum a mile yet. I scan the lake, look across to the other side to see the windmills, and an outline of city scrapers. Thirty minutes far, if you drive on the highway.

I try to find my swimming pal, looking for his swim cap. He told me he’d swim deep. I see nothing but water, white caps, but nothing like his swim one.

I see no one, save figures far off, people, probably getting feet wet.

I put my head back in, pointing toward the shore, doing the cycle with my arms, my legs, my body, trying to get closer to a place where I feel safe. The waves catch me. I beg them to push me.

Eat Your Plate

Lilacs, cows, a lane between fields. Climbing on the stone pile. The smell of hay. Picking from the garden. In winter, the rain freezes where sometimes you skate. There’s a basketball hoop, over by the silo. A machine shed, and you go there anytime you want, seeing tractors, sitting on a big one. Your dad oils them. Sometimes the oil cakes. When it does, you like to put your feet there to let the gel seep under your toenails. At the end of the lane is a creek, and you put your feet there too, where you feel the current: the water icy, clear; you see schools of darting minnows. You pick asparagus from the ditch, a ditch you are told you should be proud of. Your ancestors made that ditch. Came over from a boat, in the eighteen hundreds. Out in the fields, you lift bales, feeling burning in your muscles, knowing about work. Getting up before the rooster, to where the calves are hungry. You put that powdered scoop into the bucket, adding cups of water. Put your hand in, mix; put the pail under eyes with pink and muzzled noses - these babies slurp and suck. Like you are told that you did. Your father taught you how to teach them. Climb the ladder to the hayloft, where the cats you don’t know scatter, how you look into the straw mounds, curious of holes, how you have come up with your flashlights, seeing those same cats having creatures small as thumbs, slimy with their eyes closed, their mother licking them, you a big invader with no right to anything but a desire to know. Doesn’t matter that your father strips you there and slaps you, teaching you a lesson, a lesson, the lesson of the hayloft: of restraint, that restraint you know so well, not to laugh or cry—to not whine nor ask about anything, anything. That hayloft, that bridge you walk across to take a bale to feed the heifers, that not being your desire, but your job, a way of survival as to not hear that yelling, how that one board is so wobbly and the hay bale is so heavy, how you look ahead, never down, smelling the manure, and...