The Summer We Ran to Water

Martha stood at the edge of Miller's Pond, the same spot where she and Eleanor had dared each other to jump fifty years ago. Her gray hair—once the color of summer wheat—caught the morning light as she remembered how they'd spent endless days swimming here, skin turning to leather, bellies hungry from all that running through the meadow.

That was before life happened. Before Eleanor moved to California. Before Martha married Thomas. Before the children, the grandchildren, the years that slipped through fingers like water.

"You still come here?" Eleanor's voice behind her. They hadn't seen each other in thirty years, not since Eleanor's husband's funeral. Yet here she was, standing at the pond's edge, hair white as Martha's now, both of them older than their mothers had been when they first started coming here.

They sat on the old wooden dock, feet dangling over water that sparkled like diamonds. Eleanor reached into her purse and pulled out two small bottles.

"My doctor insists," she laughed, handing Martha a vitamin D supplement. "Says at our age, we need all the help we can get. But I think the real vitamin was this place. This friendship. All those summers."

Martha swallowed the pill with lake water, just as they'd done as children with stolen peppermints. "Remember when we tried running away to live here? We lasted three hours before your mother found us."

"We were going to build a house," Eleanor smiled. "Sleep under the stars. Eat fish we'd catch ourselves."

Instead, they'd built lives elsewhere. Families. Careers. Memories they now pulled from pockets like smooth stones, each one precious and irreplaceable. Martha thought of her grandchildren, how she'd brought them here last summer. How little Sophie had asked if the water had always been this magical.

"Do you think," Martha asked, "that all this swimming and running and living—do you think it adds up to something?"

Eleanor took her hand, the same hand that had pulled her from the water when she'd cramped at fifteen. The same hand that had held hers at both their weddings.

"It already has," Eleanor said. "We're still here. Still friends. Still remembering. That's something."

They sat until the sun began to set, gold painting the water, two old women with hair like snow, full of years and vitamins and memories, running backward through time together, swimming through the waters of what was and what still remained.