Presque Isle

The Ice Age created this place my soul calls home.

My life maps to every curve of its 11,000-year-old body, every unfurled canyon and gully every deep blue expanse.

Here my father, the Eagle Scout, the lifeguard the war veteran who knew death placed me on his hand in saltless waters when I was two and taught me to swim – a chubby fish paddling the waves.

Like me, this place survived and goes on surviving.

For years before my father died our family came to these beaches on cool dusky mornings for sunrise beach breakfasts eggs and bacon blended with the scent of pine and lake water. We washed our sweat-coated bodies in the cool waves.

Here I baked in the sun in my first bikini, sat on driftwood and wrote my first poems.

I kissed my first boyfriend

And believed in something like love.

After the first snowfall,

I would drive the peninsula and savor the hush of pristine whiteness, waves halted frozen mid-stride, the snow-heavy trees arched overhead like an ancient cathedral.

Years later, no hair, no eyebrows, no lashes I will heal from cancer on a friend’s boat, miles from shore.

I will want to be invisible.

I will want to believe I am more than just a body a man I loved could no longer love.

I will know what I’ve always known – no one can find me in the middle of Lake Erie. My friends who love me will put me in the hold and take care of me while I lie down and watch gulls glide above a curving shoreline, that ancient beauty, and with the gently rocking motion of the waves,

I will sleep like the child I was.

Janet Roberts grew up in Erie, PA, and now lives in Pittsburgh. Her 2015 novel, The Narrow Gate, won the 2017 TAZ Award’s 1st Place in Fiction (sponsored by The Author Zone in Pittsburgh), and her memoir, Seven Thin Dimes, received an Honorable Mention in the same contest. When she’s not writing, she leads a global security education and awareness program.