A drunk woman invites me into her canoe. It isn’t really her canoe; it belongs to a sullen man sitting by a campfire. I had wandered through the woods from my own campsite, looking for beer, and found them to be friendly enough. We’d sat drinking for a while, not talking about much. But I got the sense that they were mad at one another. From little bitter comments they made, I pieced it together: he’d invited her on this camping trip to sleep with her, and it wasn’t going his way. The woman was at the point where she didn’t want to see him, or hear his voice. So, after a half an hour of him sulking, she invites me to go out in the canoe with her, just to get away from him. He makes a sharp comment about the canoe being his property. She ignores him. I follow her to the shore of a shallow, weedy pond. Are you sure he wants us to take the canoe? I ask. She says it’s fine. He didn’t seem like he wanted us to take it, I say. Now she’s annoyed with me. We paddle out. The pond is not so large, surrounded by tangled greenery. We get to the middle and then float. She smokes a cigarette, ashing into the dark water. A mirror of black. Then, out of the blue, she says: I know what kind of man you are. You’re a prick, just like my ex-husband. She tells me this, and we float for a while in silence. There is nowhere else to go. I am nineteen years old.

            #

I stand in front of a yellow house. It is my house, a thing I never believed that I would actually own. Within the house, my wife. I have achieved the things there are to achieve. I am returning from a jog around our neighborhood, up and down roads lined with trees and tucked-back houses. People with elaborate decks and store-bought chicken coops. I think of the Talking Heads song that goes: How did I get here? I’m moved to celebrate this perfection, and spend the afternoon renting a stump grinder and grinding a stump from the flowerbed in front of the house. Right in the nook where two walls of the L-shaped house meet – the heart of the house, the perfect location for the rose bush that I will plant there. Grinding a stump is more difficult than I anticipated. The roots are huge and tangled and reach deep into the Earth. The grinder is like a squat, heavy lawnmower. It only seems to shave small pieces off the stump that is standing in the way of my expression of love. For hours I attack it with the grinder, with an axe, at one point with a screwdriver that I stab into the roots in a frenzy. When the job is done, my fingers are bleeding. I go inside to find my wife. I have to show you something. She reluctantly puts on pants follows me outside, to the front of the house. See? I say to her. Now you’ll have flowers all the time. Aren’t flowers the thing you wanted? Every flower on this bush is a flower from me. I wonder if the rose bush is still there. I know that she is.

            #

I am at my writing desk, looking out the window, wondering why I’m spending my life this way: alone, amassing pages of daydreams, idles, fancies. I’ve been deposited here like a sediment, in an old building one block from a brown river. Three stories below there is an unfenced yard, with a small tree and a playhouse for the landlord’s daughter’s children, a boy and a girl. The little girl is outside, slowly twirling, making small leaps and flourishes for an imaginary audience. She is followed by a kitten. She cannot see me, isn’t aware that anyone is watching. She gambols across the yard. Her movements are free, purely her own. She turns to issue instructions to the kitten; it stops for a moment, and seems to listen. I admire her; she is in command of her small world. I would rather be her, I think. But then again, maybe I would rather be me. High above her, watching, unseen. The wind is blowing.

            #

A canoe again. In the canoe this time is my wife. The lake is high and stormy, a gray expanse, bordered by thick evergreen forest. Cold water smacks the sides of our craft. There are miles between us and our car, us and another living person. We have no business being out on the water in these conditions, but I insisted that we try to cross the lake. We would be intrepid. We would brave the danger together, and grow closer because it has tested us. I paddle hard against the wind. My wife is sitting in the front of the canoe, her paddle across her lap. She is scared, and she is crying.