Last Summer

Lying in a hammock overlooking the Damariscotta River at 5:01 on a Saturday afternoon. Our daughter is at camp; my wife is resting in the bedroom of my parents house up the hill. There is a faint breeze soughing through the trees and the sound of water lapping at the rocks below. The faint rumble of an outboard engine as a teenager in an aluminum skiff motors toward the beach at Dodge Point. Scraps of voices, shouting, daring ... a splash followed by laughter.

There is a feeling that this could be the last summer. 

So many reminders of the summers that have gone before ... the shrill whistle of an osprey wheeling above the scrim of black spruces ... the fern-tangled road from the Hunter farm through the woods down to the landing, where chunks of Caribbean coral lay scattered in the marine clay that had been fired in kilns along the river by barefooted men, hardening to become the spines and shoulders of buildings in Portland, Boston, New York .. the fragment of a 17th Century iron pot dug up in my parent's side yard...

A pale grey cloud spreads toward the sun, but there are slashes of brilliant light in the west. They will come; when we need them, they will come.