Standing between the cedar house and salty bath, I curled the earth under my toes, using each blade of grass to brush sand off my feet. The sun was hot and I felt the skin on my shoulders pull tight as the watery evidence of my day was taken into the air and white flakes of salt were left behind as a trophy. A loon, black and slick like oil, perched himself on a piling out in the middle of the creek. He outstretched his wings and we mimicked each other, basking in the summer and patiently drying ourselves. I heard an osprey call out to another, or to nothing.

At this time, sounds were what made sense to me. Everything communicated in succession – nothing of the same language, all understanding each other. The birds cawed back and forth and the water hugged the beach, taking a bit with it each time; it moved up on the dock and weaved among the beach reeds as fiddler crabs all moved at once at the vibration of human feet. I would look down from the dock and they glided across the beach like a blanket, disappearing into their homes, scratching quietly at their walls. I would lay on the dock and listen to the soft echo of water lapping up against the boat, and the boat would then rock gently into the dock, and the dock float would dip back into the water, and the Rube Goldberg of nature would respond. The summer communicated in a way that a child could comprehend, and as an adult, I would struggle to understand again.

I would sit in a wicker chair underneath the tallest oak trees in the world, and look for squirrels as acorns fell to the deck, bouncing several times before settling into place. The chair creaked underneath me while I drank Coca Cola and my grandmother coughed gently every once in a while into her tissue that she hid in her sleeve. Her systematic sips of tea were timed with her exhales as she returned her mug into place. I was the audience to the symphony of summer in the stale July heat, waiting for the finale. As the sun prepared to start its descent behind the houses down the creek, a wind would pick up and I watched as it ran its fingers through the trees which made the branches chase each other in waves. That was the most beautiful sound: the wind through the trees. My hair gently pulled like the leaves above me, unable to see the wind, only what it touched.

When night fell onto the landscape, the wind lay background to the chirps that were replaced by crickets, and the silence never came. The world never stopped, only mine. The water lapped, black and murky, among the reeds and against the boat. The birds passed the hat to the bugs and were settled into bed. Moths and beetles tapped the windows and I listened to the singing world, and the wind in the trees, and joined the birds in sleep.