“The river and the garden have been the foundations of my economy here. Of the two I have liked the river best. It is wonderful to have the duty of being on the river the first and last thing every day. I have loved it even in the rain. Sometimes I have loved it most in the rain.”
― Wendell Berry

To mark the holiday, a river paddle. My friend joins me, and we walk to the misted river, take the kayaks down, each our single, and launch from the grassy edge. The surface is placid, the air is moist and warm. There is only quiet, and beauty. My home on the river lies between bridges. We head toward the Farm Road Bridge. We paddle and talk in the morning about family, about our active summer together, about the oncoming changes of autumn. We spot heron and beaver and turtles, of course. Occasional hints of reddening leaves. We pass no houses, only trees, and trails through them. It’s Labor Day, the holiday signaling seasonal change, end of summer, start of school. Strange year of strained and broken rituals, but the river shows no signs of this stress of human trouble. I work more on poems, continue submitting, and feel excited and less negative. After dinner, before i meet with my poetry pals online, I find the day outdoors isn’t done. I am drawn out into the pleasant air and find myself weeding in the dimming light, cleaning up. It grows so dark Frank finds me filling the wagon with weeds and shines the light to help me pull the last few. I don’t want to go indoors. I want every bit of this fresh air in shorts and bare feet in the cool, green grass. I think about my mother, marking the Labor Day weekend with her move home from her New Hampshire cabin, helping her unpack her car and put her summer at Laurel Lake away. And the last summer she went, telling me, as I stood in her kitchen, “I got lost.” She couldn’t remember the way home, the way home she’d driven hundreds of times, year after year. A signaling. Encroaching dementia. Her last summer at the cabin had come to an end. I went online, met with my two friends, one in Mississippi, one in Texas, and we shared poems and helped each other and laughed and felt the pleasure of trust and friendship and feedback. I live between two bridges on this river. I went into the glimmering stillness and let the calm surround me and the stillness center me.