There wasn’t a light in the pea-green outhouse when my parents had purchased the small plot of lake-side land in Upper Michigan in ’95, during a time when you didn’t have to be from Illinois and rich to do so. Electricity was the last thing they’d install. “That’s what they made candles and flashlights for,” Mom said.
First they cut down the thick patches of pines and birches alone the shoreline so that you could actually see the lake from a top the hill where the green, trailer sat from the previous owners from Florida. It was a summer home for them, a mansion to us. The trailer sat like a time machine forgotten about: the roofed sagged, the floor had bullet-size holes that had to be plugged up, and mice had taken over every cubby. It was ours just the same.
A year later, a local friend of our family from Watersmeet, a well witcher, came out with a willow branch in the shape of a wishbone tucked into his back pocket like a sling shot. He walked slowly back and forth across the sandy property as though looking for gold coins until the tip of the branch pulled his old arms downward: If the branch could have spoken, it would’ve said, “Here! Here! Dig here! Here is where the water is!”
Years later, electricity came, like an announced visitor that wasn’t welcomed to supper. For, no one likes to set an extra plate when everyone around the table wants seconds—takes the hunger out of things.
Light, unlike water, is not something you need. . . . You can think in the dark.
divining rods are cool. i saw that when i was younger. really like your description of that
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