Chapter 2: THE lAKE
Before the rain, before the words that came too late, before the silence, there was the lake.
I met David in the mid-1980s, during summers that stretched endlessly, as summers do when you are a child. His grandparents’ lake cottage sat a few doors down from ours, and every year I would see David’s parents’ red Jeep Cherokee come rambling down the dirt road delivering David and his younger sister Kara to their grandparents. Kara was the same age as my younger sister Marie, while David was one year older than me. They would arrive spontaneously for a weekend, or even a whole week at a time, and within minutes they were either at our house or we were at theirs. It was that easy. Those visits felt permanent back then, as if summer itself belonged to us. It was pure unspoiled childhood joy.
The lake was in a small town in Central Massachusetts and it was lined mostly with 3-season summer camps that now seem to be extinct, demolished and rebuilt with large year round trophy second homes. Boats and jet skis zipped across the water all day, and on the Fourth of July, the lake became a party. Residents set off fireworks from docks and shorelines like it was our obligation.
We spent our days fishing off the dock, swimming until our skin wrinkled, riding bikes down the dirt road, eating ice cream, and piling into our tin boat and rowing out with no destination in mind. We played games until dark and lit fireworks we barely knew how to handle, laughing and screaming when they burned too close or fizzled out too soon.
That was how we first knew each other, barefoot, unguarded, and uncomplicated. Long before attraction had a name, and long before either of us understood how certain people quietly weave themselves into your life and never quite leave.
The Road
We were around ten years old then. The lake road was a dead end. Dusty, bumpy, sparsely populated, and entirely our playground. We rode our bikes up and down it for hours, challenging each other to make the longest burn-outs in the dirt, going over little jumps we made, racing to the sand dunes at one end or to the Holland Market at the other for slushies, candy, or ice cream that always seemed to melt too fast in the summer heat.
One Sunday in particular I remember, David’s grandparents invited me to go to church with them. Our church has an outdoor pavilion where they hold Mass in the warm summer months. I don’t remember the sermons, but I remember the neon tiered pink skirt and side pony tail pulled back tightly with a scrunchie that I wore. It was the mid-1980’s after-all, and everything felt loud and bright, our clothes, our bikes, the way we laughed. And after church, of course there was always ice cream.
Even back then, David made everything feel lighter. Like being with him was something you could slip into as easily as summer itself.
The Dunes
The sand dunes past the dead end of the road felt like another world. We climbed the dirt cliff walls and slid down into the pit below, or tried riding our bikes down the rocky sandy walls without crashing if we were feeling brave.
The grass surrounding the dunes was never mowed. In the early evening light of summer, it shimmered, tall and golden, the wind moving it to sway gently in its breeze. Even today still, when I hear Fields of Gold by Sting, it pulls me straight back there with David, to that exact light and that exact hour, evoking the memory of the feelings of those summers.
I will never understand why certain moments lodge themselves so deeply inside me. But memories that stick over the years have a way of establishing themselves as being important, sort of like something was being written without my permission.
Fun & Games
We played endless games of badminton, tether ball, and elaborate games of hide-and-seek throughout the neighborhood. We disappeared into sheds, behind trees, and under decks, always trying to one-up each other to be the last one found. Occasionally Kara and Marie would get frustrated and quit, since we were the older siblings and far better at hiding.
Once, in the middle of one of our games, we noticed a rabbit family living under his grandparents’ shed and decided on a whim that we should try to catch one. Using a fishing net, we slid it underneath, wiggled it around, and pulled it out like a magic trick, stunned to find a baby rabbit staring back at us. We let it go immediately, gently setting it back where it belonged, while laughing hysterically at the absurd luck of it all.
We invented games constantly. One particularly memorable game we affectionately called “War.” Pinecones became bombs. Rocks were grenades. The people on the top deck of the swing set were on a ‘ship’ and everyone on the ground had the singular goal of overtaking it. It was chaotic, slightly dangerous (we weren’t allowed to aim for the head of course), and endlessly entertaining. It was the 1980’s after-all.
Lunch was sometimes a treat of peanut butter and fluff sandwiches on classic white bread, eaten quickly and washed down with gulps of water straight from the hose so we could get back to playing. We spent hours in the wooden playhouse my father had built near the lake, then moved on to swinging on the tire swing or the hammock by the lake, clawing the ropes as we pushed each other higher and higher until almost flipping.
It was in the playhouse that David debuted his beatbox rap, “Wake Up and Smell the Coffee.” I don’t remember why the beatboxing started, maybe it was a half-tease aimed at Kara, or at me, but suddenly he was performing, making up rhythms like it was the most natural thing in the world. We doubled over laughing, the kind of laughter that felt endless, like summer itself. That little rap became our secret, a joke that only we fully understood, a small thread that tied us together and we would carry quietly with us for years.
Together we always turned ordinary time into something memorable.
Rain
When it rained, though it never seemed to happen that often, we sometimes went to David’s grandparents’ house. We would play cards using their card shuffling machine, or pick-up-sticks for hours on the braided wool rug in the living room overlooking the lake, the quiet broken only by the clatter of fallen sticks and outbursts of laughter when someone lost.
David’s grandparents had an old picture-show machine that already felt antique back then. We would peer through it, cautiously advancing the images slowly, gazing at the stories that existed inside the small box.
They also had an Airstream camper that they would keep parked next to their garage that we all loved to play inside, especially when in the rain. Inside the garage, David’s grandfather had a workshop filled with tin-can airplanes that was a hobby of his to make. I loved walking through the garage gazing up at the dozens of airplanes suspended above my head. He also had a prized and carefully built-to-scale model train set inside the workshop. We would sit mesmerized and watch the trains circle their tiny village, content in this way of letting time pass unnoticed.
Sometimes, if my mother felt we stayed too long, she would yell for us to give them a break, to come home, to do something else, to separate for a bit. But the distance never held. Within fifteen minutes we were asking again, bargaining for just a little more time, as if time itself were something we could stretch if we tried hard enough. Even then, being apart felt wrong.
What sticks in my memory most is how easy it always was. David and I never argued. We didn’t bicker or over-compete the way other kids did. We just fit, moving from one game to the next, one space to another, without friction or effort. Being together felt natural, like something already decided.
Outside, the rain would tap softly against the windows or drum lightly on the camper roof, enclosing us in our small, shared world. Back then, rain only meant waiting, passing time until we could go back outside again.
I didn’t know yet that one day rain would come to mean something else entirely.
Someone I Used to Know 