The year of the lake

Found the photos from the Nantahala summer while clearing the phone. 2021. The year after the first lockdown year, when everything opened and nobody had any money and we drove out to the lake nearly every weekend from May to September because it was free. Danny had a canoe he had bought for two hundred dollars and repaired himself and which leaked in a way he insisted was within tolerance. That was the best year we have had. I can say that plainly. We were broke and I had a caseload of fourteen because the referrals had not come back yet, and we spent four months mostly outdoors with Tess and Marcus and whoever else turned up, and nothing in it was planned. It ended in the spring of 2022, for reasons that are the subject of about nine other entries in here. I am not nostalgic about it in a way that makes the present worse. That is not what this is. It is more that I had forgotten there was a version of the two of us with that much room in it, and then there were forty photographs of it on a Sunday afternoon. Showed Danny. He looked at them for a long time and said, we should get another canoe, and I said yes, and neither of us meant it as a plan and both of us meant it.

Yes. I had not noticed that I date things from it. I say "before the lake" and "after" and what I actually mean is before and after that year, and I have been doing it in my head for four years.