Lake St. Clair: A Short Story

When my father was young, his father had bought him and his siblings an orange plastic play boat to use at the family cottage. It had ore holders and a rope on the front in order for someone to drag it behind them in the shallow parts or to tie to the steps that lead into the cold waters of Lake St. Clair. My father loved that orange boat and he and his five siblings claimed that I was unsinkable. It lasted the wear and tear of burning hot summers with crazy thunderstorms and through freezing lake winters in the shed with whimsical blizzards.
It has even lasted through me, my sisters, and my cousins. We have rammed it into the lake walls causing the sides to be beaten and banged up. We have gotten it stuck under the dock, the rope caught on a log at the bottom of the lake. It would never break and …show more content…
It had been years since I had gone through the photographs in my basement and I pulled a random envelope from the very bottom of my family’s photography box. A feeling surprise overcame me when I discovered an envelope with photographs from the summer of 2006. In one of the photos, there was a picture of a young girl, who can’t be older than eight, sitting in my unsinkable orange boat. She’s smiling with glee, lips stretched from ear to ear, her eyes squinting to block out the bright rays of the early summer sun. She has on a worn down yellow and orange ‘Justice’ bikini. It seems that she had worn it so much from summers past that the vibrant colors were fading.
She looks so happy, so innocent, and so unfamiliar to me. She looks like a complete stranger to me. But after a few hesitant minutes I realized, she is me. Why can’t I tell that she is me?
This was the summer that little girl’s family spent a majority of their time at their cottage, one of the places she loved most. This was the summer before she started public school. This was the summer before she was hit with the real