I keep a bowl full of crystals in my office. This is not for new age reasons. I do not focus on the healing, energetic properties of rocks. I find them beautiful and fascinating, something of heft and cut to hold in the hand, to trace with a finger, for a client to press into Crazy Aaron’s thinking putty and distract themselves with patterns. Some of the crystals have their outer skins, the dull rock they emerged from, still intact. The average person would never know the color and edge that rough dullness contains.

This is what I think of when I remember the Elk, a brown-green, mucky-bottomed river on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, weekend and summer cottage spot for the lower middle class of Delaware and Pennsylvania (at least in the 1950s-80s, when my mother and I were growing up). Appearances are deceiving. What this river contains is childhood, freedom, skinny-dipping, sex, the undertow of passing ships moving from the C&D canal to the Chesapeake Bay.

When my mother’s well went dry, she filled five gallon buckets with water from the Elk to tide her over. The first night I met D, it was in the parking lot next to the beach, a memory attached to memories that fill me with yearning, regret, and sadness. From the phone booth next to the clubhouse that my grandfather totaled when driving drunk to the homemade raft created from barrels and planks to the crab pots attached to the pier – crack open the memories, go beneath the surface, and what exists is something dead and gone and alive in my mind, in the stories I tell

From the prompt: Child swimming