A GRAPHIC MEMOIR
After dinner, my brother and I walked down to the boathouse. Gordie and Jaspar were due to arrive sometime in the middle of the night and we had to drive in to town to pick them up and lead them on the winding dirt roads back to the lake, but they wouldn’t arrive until late, so we had decided to kill some time out on the water.
We dragged out the long guideboat, securing the oars with a metallic wham that resonated across the placid lake as I pushed the two of us off the dock.
As we rowed past the raft, Pedro, our exuberant golden retriever, barked sharply from the porch of the kitchen cabin. We could hear our mom comforting him while his bark echoed off the surrounding mountains but all else on the lake was quiet.
The warmth of the day had already slipped behind Trusty Mountain with the sun, so William and I donned thick flannels.
When we were little, our grandfather would lead us up the steep mountain on rainy mornings to look for newts. We would find them hiding beneath the wet remnants of fall leaves or clambering across the path, their spotted red backs glowing against the mossy earth and giving away their hiding places.
We would pick them up and stroke their soft orange bellies, and wonder why nature made them the color of the sunset. I liked to talk to the newts and I really thought they could understand me, maybe because when I introduced myself as Eliza, people tended to exclaim, “Like Eliza Thornberry on Nickelodeon! Can you talk to animals too?” or maybe just because I liked the idea. We never named the newts because our grandfather would convince us to let them go before returning back to camp, their hearts visibly thumping in their chests as we released them back onto the wet moss.
