A fox runs out in front of me as I leave the library, so quick the creature might have been my imaginings in the night. Upstairs, people are still talking and laughing, remnants from the Selectboard meeting. Behind me, the man who lives down the road, with neither water nor electricity and is often at the library at night, his phone plugged into an outlet in the foyer that’s left unlocked, perhaps for this reason, says, “Saw it, huh? Fox.”

The sunset has simmered down to a liquified gold spill in the darkness. I pull into the beach. I’m alone here, and I get out of my Subaru and lie down on the wet sand. I can feel the damp sand clump into my hair. The waves lap. The spill of light shrinks. The crickets are doing their sizzling thing, and goddamn, here it is again, end of August, a goodbye to the sunflowers not far in the offing.

I spent so many hours of my mothering life at this beach, and now this summer has slipped by without a single visit to this particular beach. The sun goes down. And here’s the weird thing: while I’m lying there, dampening, dampening, wondering what’s up with the universe anyway? Why does it always feel like loss, loss, loss, a canoe paddles by. In a funk, I don’t bother to sit up and chat with strangers, but the couple steers their craft right onto the shore and asks what’s up with me….

So, I sit up and talk.

Turns out, even strangers, we have strangely similar intersecting points. In the dark, the lake lapping at their canoe, we stand talking while the stars blink on, just a few, in the cloudy night. Then, instinctively, as if in some kind of pact, we reach out and shake hands. Then I’m off to my home and my hungry cats, and the couple paddles on…. maybe an imagining, maybe not….