Swimming to the Top of the Tide by Patricia Hanlon

Author:Patricia Hanlon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Published: 2021-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

There are few photos of that day, and only one shot of the entire wedding party. We stand in a semicircle under the densely purple canopy of a copper beech tree. Robert and I are exchanging rings, and promising lifelong fidelity to each other. We are both twenty-three, our faces smooth, our bodies taut.

My dress and the bridesmaids’ dresses came from a department store. Our bouquets were rhododendron from Robert’s parents’ yard. We had bought four Pepperidge Farm vanilla sheet cakes, placed them on some foil-covered cardboard, and scattered flowers on the icing to obscure the seams.

Afterward, we all changed into shorts and played softball.

There’s the iconic moment, and then there’s the rest of your lives. We drove up to Boothbay Harbor to a waterfront cottage lent by friends of Robert’s family, and set up housekeeping together. For dinner, we found half a package of Minute Rice in the backseat of our car, left over from the rice-throwing ceremony. Robert speared a flounder in the rocky cove.

A tendency that has stayed with us: to improvise with whatever is at hand.

This was more accurate than we knew: I was about a week pregnant at the time, hormonal activity altering my body even as we played backgammon and went snorkeling and climbed Mount Desert. After the honeymoon, I would feel the first twinges of morning sickness.

The heart begins as a single tube, a channel. There would be a moment, forever invisible and unrecorded, when that tiny organ tapped its first beat.

We had been aiming at careers as academics, and where we might have ended up after grad school is anyone’s guess. But the clump of cells that became our first child had a kind of plumbline effect on both of us. By default we stayed in the area for the summer and just never left.

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