I grew up on Lake Huron. Well, along the Lake Huron shore, anyway. We had a cottage along the lake and I’d spend hours outside in the tall grass, burning my young skin, carrying materials for a forest fort in my bike rack, catching praying mantis bugs and letting them climb up my blond-haired arms. In the evenings, I’d find fish flies and throw them into the spider webs. That should have been an early warning sign for my parents. Just kidding. They didn’t know. And I think most kids did that sort of thing. I wanted to see what would happen. The spiders needed to eat too, right? It was a science experiment — if I do this, then this happens. Cause and effect. Speaking of something I didn’t learn, I burnt my back so many times in the summer — who needs sunscreen when you’re a kid?! There’s no time for that stuff. I had to build forts and forage for nails and make stairs and read books to identify the local plants and know what to eat and what to use as artillery. Normal, violent kid stuff. Okay, let me start this over again; I’m not making a very good sterile impression here. This degradation of thought, this imprecision in my meaning, is what happens when energy wanes. Another example of entropy. Another example of a poor metaphor. Exactly.

If you’re entertained by this, feel free to show my teacher some appreciation.

I don’t live near Lake Huron anymore. I wonder if I’d move back. It is a beautiful place. It reminds me of my childhood and of my family. My favourite lakeside memories are of our bonfires when the whole little community would come down to the water and we’d skip stones and make smores and talk about so-and-so’s grandkids and their cousins’ parents who used to live next to your brother in 1980. I miss our little retirement community. As a kid I hadn’t realized that everybody there was over 60. I liked it that way.