So Many Minnows
Dublin, NH
Stand still in the shallows at Dublin long enough and they find your feet. Minnows, a dozen, then more, nosing at your ankles and toes in what my family has come to call, with more affection than accuracy, a pedicure. Pescatory pedicures. And this year they were more crowded, more ticklish, and frankly more uncomfortable than any summer I can remember.
Every year in Dublin is different.
That's not why we keep coming back. We come back because we love this place, and we love these people, and yes, because of the fish pedis. But every year is different anyway. Some summers the loons nest close; some years the eagle is an event and some years it is furniture. You return for the same reasons, and the water hands you a different summer regardless.
This year I cannot make the accounting come out. There are more minnows than there have ever been, and I have no idea why. It is not for lack of predators. I have seen the big fish, hiding under the near raft and the middle raft, which is as far as I've gone this summer. The big raft still holds too much mystery below it. But a lake with that many hungry mouths should hold fewer minnows, not a sudden multitude. I have watched this lake for years. I know its moods and its edges and the way the light lies on it late in the afternoon. And still: something is different this summer, and I have looked, and I cannot find it.
Every year on the beach I read my girls the same book, Roxaboxen, Alice McLerran's story, illustrated by Barbara Cooney, about children who build a whole town out of rocks and old boxes on a bare desert hill, and then, in its final pages, leap forward across a lifetime to those same children grown old and still carrying the place inside them. I have read it aloud a dozen times. I still cannot get through the ending. My voice goes. The girls have learned to wait it out.
The minnows and the book turn out to be saying the same quiet thing this week. This whole series rests on the conviction that attention is a kind of prayer: that if you return to one small place and watch it faithfully, it will teach you.
It will.
But watching does not make the place yours. You can come back to a water year after year, give it your fullest attention, and it will still keep one thing back.
The children never explained Roxaboxen. They inhabited it, and it lived in them.
My girls will not remember this year's minnow count. They will remember the beach, and the book, and their father losing the thread at the same page every time.
So we pack the car, and I say what I say every year. Beloved Dublin, thank you. For the loons and the smoke-red sunsets and the cold morning water. For another summer of being taught by a place small enough to love completely and large enough to keep its secrets.
Until next year.
Though I will drive south still turning it over, no closer than when I waded in: why, in a lake full of big fish and careful attention, are there suddenly so many minnows?
A Prayer
God of the returning summers and the water we cannot read to the bottom: you gave us a world worth watching and never promised we would understand it. Teach us to love what we cannot finally explain: the crowded shallows, the book that undoes us, the places that keep their own counsel. Send us home grateful, and bring us back curious, holding our questions open instead of forcing them shut. With Christ, who walked the road beside two travelers who did not know him, and stayed. Amen.
