The Three Boxes On Our Bench

They promised to meet me at the lake in fifty five years and I came back to three boxes on our bench

I left the house before the sun came up, which is a thing I have not done since Harry was alive and we still kept dairy hours. I made coffee in the dark so I would not wake anyone, though there was no one left in that house to wake. I stood at the counter in my good coat and I drank it looking out the window at the yard, and then I set the cup in the sink and I did not wash it, and I think that small act of leaving a dirty cup in a clean sink was the bravest thing I did all week.

It is four hours from my place in the southern part of the state up to Kettle Lake, if you take the county roads the way I like to, and I had decided before I even went to bed that I was going to take the county roads.

The interstate is faster. But the interstate does not go past the places that made me, and this was a day for going past the places that made me.

I am sixty eight years old. My name is Ruth Ann Mueller now, though for the first eighteen years of my life it was Ruth Ann Keller, and to four people in this world I was never Ruth Ann at all. I was Ruthie. Just Ruthie. The way you are only ever one name to the people who knew you before you knew yourself.

Fifty five years ago, in the summer of 1971, five of us made a promise on a bench by that lake. We were thirteen years old. We swore on it like it was a Bible, with our hands stacked one on top of the other the way kids do, and we did not have the first idea what fifty five years was or what it would take out of a person. Thirteen year olds think the future is a place you visit. They do not know it is a river that takes things.

I want to tell you what was on that bench when I got there Saturday morning. But I have to tell you about the summer first, or none of it will land the way it landed on me.

Let me tell you about the five of us.

There was Dot first, because there was always Dot first. Dorothy Lindqvist, who lived on the dairy farm two miles up County Highway M from my folks and who could run faster than any boy in our grade and never once let a single one of them forget it. Dot had a laugh you could hear across a hayfield. When I close my eyes I can still hear it, and it has been ten years since the last time there was anyone alive making that sound.

There was Lorraine Petersen, soft where Dot was sharp, who read books under the dock and cried at everything and loved us so hard it embarrassed her. Lorraine kept a little diary with a brass lock and she wrote all our names in it, and she is the reason I know the exact date we made the promise, because she wrote it down and years later she told me what it said.