A Million Tiny Mirrors

On a Sunday afternoon I went to a lake that was supposed to be frozen. It was not frozen, instead, the turquoise blue swam just below the little white laps of the waves. Are you looking at the colors? I asked my kids. Yes, they said. And again, I asked, Are you really looking at the colors? Because I wanted to make sure that they know how to fill themselves with what is offered. The lighter turquoise seemed to rise from the deepness and mix with the darkest blues, as if to show off to them. But I knew that no lake cares about our approval, about our witness.

Earlier that week, my son was at a high school walkout protest over ICE. 200 kids walked over two miles with their signs in the air. At one point, a mile in, between the elementary school that I attended 30 years ago and the college football stadium, a woman in her 70’s pulled her car over to yell to the kids that they had been brainwashed. My son said she was relentless, a tiresome person who believes that kids cannot trust their intuition. My son said he leaned in the car window and said something back to her, and even though he says that now he can’t remember what it was, and even though I want to feel embarrassed or nervous that he would do that, I don’t.

My son did not need any witness beyond his own conscience. Another kid told me it happened and honestly, I felt proud that he knew how to be angry. That he knows how to stand up and leave in the middle of class because he heard kids chanting.

My friend held a bake sale to raise money for the immigrant advocacy coalition. Another friend, who spends a lot of her time on the phone with insurance companies for her two kids who have both autism and an eye disease that is very scary, borrowed some vodka to paint delicate drawings onto sugar cookies. Another friend, who cannot help but be too much, brought cookies in the shape of teddy bears and giant hearts. Both sets sat on the on the card tables, beaming in their cellophane bags. A bake sale on the corner downtown, we do what we can.

I didn’t want to write about anything political. I chose a lake, the color of the lake, on purpose. The lake and an empty winter city, the burger shacks closed down, nowhere to even get coffee. We crossed the border into Idaho and bought scratch tickets at the first gas station we came to. None of us won a single dollar and inside that loss was something better, which was being together.

We ran on the sand, nearly white sand, and imagined how in the summer, we would not be able to find a place to sit. The kids made sandcastles, and I mean real sandcastles, with molds, and moats, and tall, drippy towers. And even though their hands were cold, and the hems of their pants wet from jumping across the water, they did not stop. This was a group of kids, from a few different families, who know how to be outside.

It wasn’t that they forgot, or that we forgot, that the week before they walked out of their high schools in protest, and then walked through the halls chanting until the principal told them they had to leave. It wasn’t that we forgot, as the adults, that we aren’t sure our jobs will exist in a year. It was simply that the lake was there, and it is so deep, that a 20-story building could sit on the bottom and the water would still cover it. A fact like that, the depth of such a small piece of knowledge is comforting in its scariness. As are all the reminders that the masks, politicians, bills, angry older women in cars, high school friends who ditched us (my son) freshman year, are not bigger than a deep depression in the earth filled with turquoise, blue water that shimmers like an opal, even in the winter.

Two of the teens, the night before, had kissed for the first time. One of them asked the other to be their valentine, and in the frigid cold of a February night, under a black sky, and with a moose we spotted earlier somewhere within the mile where they sat on a blanket in a field.

The lake we visited is so blue because the lake floor is an ancient seabed that allows limestone to dissolve into the water. The sunlight hits these calcium particles, acting as a million tiny mirrors that refract and show up as turquoise.

So when I asked my kids, as we drove away, if they were looking at the colors of the lake, if they were appreciating it fully, I think what I meant, what I wanted them to do, was to know that the world they live in will always be violent and senseless, and.

I think I wanted them to push at the spaces in their hearts to make room for both anger, and for tenderness, and to reckon with the fact that neither will fix the other. We drove through the empty landscape back towards our home, slowing at the bare cottonwood where the bald eagles sometimes are. We hated the thought of having to wake up early the next day and go to Web Development and Language Arts, and third grade, and a job, and laundry.

We also knew that there were two black dogs, mutts by all accounts, and a kitty we got for my daughters 10th birthday from the shelter, who were anxiously waiting for us. Who would ask no questions about where we’d been when they jumped all over us and settled in our beds that night.

Their belief that all would be okay because we were together, was perhaps enough to hold all the things that will never make sense, and all the things we already missed from the weekend.

Photo by Courtney Jane Kendrick