The van pulled into the lakeside campsite flanked by trees and brush. Pushing on his ball cap, her brother was the first out just as he cut off the engine, their Golden Retriever launching herself out simultaneously.
Her daughter spilled out next, her plump old pug under an arm like a football, her long hair catching the sun.
The noon sun was warm and bright, and the lake was glass.
Her daughter pulled the sunglasses gently from her mother's long blond hair and settled them over her nose.
“We’re the only ones here,” she mused.
Her mother turned in a full circle to survey the surroundings.
“We’re the only ones here!” She yelled, and her daughter laughed.
“What do you think, Lovely, should we check this place out or what?”
She turned to engage the dog in the special affectionate tone she reserved just for her. She responded by turning in a few circles and bolting off down the dirt path.
Her brother stayed behind to fire up the grill, while the girls caught up to the dogs.
She kept pace with her daughter, the path wide enough for a car so she had plenty of room to veer slightly off course while gazing up at the trees: Desert Ironwood and Palo Verdes, Arizona Sycamore and Velvet Mesquite.
The streets of her hometown were named for these trees. As a girl she would fly down Mesquite on Rollerblades, knobby knees bent to distribute her weight; glide again then up Oak, stroking one able, agile limb further up the hill than the next.
She would climb them too, the trees. Should she reach a branch and find it unyielding she’d scramble atop it, scratching bare summer skin on bark, hurling herself into the leaves of the giant Mulberry trees in the front yard of her childhood home in Autumn.
Daddy called her a tree-hugger; she’d cried when roots were cut once, to make way for sanitation piping.
She had felt ashamed.
In the trees she felt a comfort, a belonging. She would step lightly on the exposed roots of the base and wrap her arms about the trunk.
And the endless chatter of her mind would silence, the nervous energy of her spirit settle.
Drinking in their beauty now her soul is no less at peace.
The sky was bright blue and the sun shone through the trees making the leaves appear neon in nature and almost iridescent. The slight breeze playing with the branches gave off an illusion of glitter.
The cicadas screeched and sparrows darted. Later there would be half a dozen species of dragonflies on the water.
Ahead of her now, her daughter’s own head was tipped to admire the trees, and she would occasionally bounce off the path to scramble up into one; she was fourteen now but so unlike her peers who seemed so immersed in social media; she preferred the wild abandon of nature to society like her mother.
The road wrapped the lake and Lovely stopped to poke in some bushes and she sat for a moment in the shade of a giant Cottonwood and turned her face to the sun.
All year the skin on her cheeks is kissed by the sun. The comforting warm wraps her in its welcome and she’s known to chase it from the shadows. She never grimaced at the glide of perspiration down her back all her years of labor. To be afforded the opportunity to work under it had always been a blessing to her.
She hadn’t been so proud of the carbon footprint she had dug so deep into her precious Earth during her time in the trades. Certainly it was selfish, she imagined, to enjoy a world you were destroying.
Yet all her life she’d felt peace outside, and like this, in nature. At home. Grounded.
As a child she’d cavorted about the gulch near her neighborhood, her worn sneakers forging paths between Brittlebush and Manzanita. Always, a dog at her side then too.
“Let’s go see about that lake!”
This time she took off first and the dogs and her daughter were quick to catch up.
At the picnic site they ate, and her brother took Lovely for a swim.
She wondered briefly if her family knew she was content. Sometimes she noted earnest hope in their eyes. She often told them she was without envy. She felt no less connected to the enchanting world than she did as a girl.
Returning, Lovely shook cold droplets on her, as she squealed, trapped.
The cool drops smelled of moss and mud and childhood.
“Some of the leaves are changing,” her brother said, plucking a yellow one for her.
Closing her eyes she felt the delicate veins of the leaf, still warm from the sun, still warm with life.
The sun was soon to sink. They watched the shades of orange and red slip out of sight behind the mountains. She thought their shape resembled that of a dolphin; her daughter saw a tiger in the sky.
“You guys ready?” Her brother put out the joint they’d smoked.
Her daughter caressed her mother’s upturned cheek with the leaf one more time and she smiled as the girl tucked it between the fingers of her left hand lying supine in her lap.
With a tap of her head, she navigated her power wheelchair to the van ramp.
