Finally, we reach the part of the lake where sandy shallows wrap around a small peninsula. We tie the canoes to branches hanging low over the water. The big boys launch noisily in the direction a Frisbee is thrown. The other mothers call for life preservers. But the boys are already gone . . . drenched in a watersong. And I am drowning in it.
My son is not yet a very big boy. He’s a little blonde glint of a different world. He flips out of the boat like a sunfish off a line. He doesn’t hear his cousins calling him to join in because he can’t. He’s deaf . . . a Seer. Off he goes, enthralled in the company of many things only he is noticing.
I, too, am in a place apart. The lake is quicksilvering in syllables of light . . . the minnows tasting my toes. I write more than words across the water with a fingertip. Things I don’t say to the others.
All the girlfriends I had before are the other mothers. Even my sisters are the other mothers; my mother is one of the others, too. The world is now divided into the others and us . . . hearing and Deaf. And I don’t belong in either place but to the space between them. A bridger. It will be years before I can accept this as the Divine gift that it is.
The breeze writes back unintelligibly in light ripples over the surface. Whatever it means gives me comfort.
Looking up, I see my little boy bending as far as possible until his ear touches the surface of the water . . . as though listening intently to it. His eyes closed in concentration. He reaches deeply for something. Half of his face submerges, the other half glows with feeling. He brings a clamshell like sunken treasure to the surface . . . checks it for a pearl.
~ Leeanne Seaver © 2014
Seaver Creative 