Floating Forward

by Julie Robinson

I feel my best when on the water. I wonder what that means, but if I think about it too much, it will take away from the Zen of it all. I just know that when I’m floating, weightless, in the cool softness of water, my edges soften.

My shoulders—always creeping toward my ears— settle back into place.

My ears tilt to attention. The less noise there is, the more they pick up.

My lungs expand as if to say Don’t forget about me. I need to stretch, too.

I’ve had ten summers to come to this realization—one slow, meandering kayak ride at a time. I thank my mother for it at every launch, but not because she taught me how to slow down. It’s the opposite. Watching my beautiful, frantic, Type A mom dart from one task to another my entire life, I decided I needed to take a beat.

We called her Birdy—that’s how frail, yet fast, she moved through her days up until nearly the end. She had heart disease from an early age; her first (of two) open-heart surgeries was at 35. She retired at 53 after a major heart attack and a twelve-hour surgery to buy us more time with her. Twenty-three years, in fact.

Birdy did her best to slow down, to smell the roses, and even to plant some at her new retirement home near my sister in Florida. She’d pack a cooler with fruit and sit on the beach at first. But old habits die hard, and in her case, they likely shortened her life. She just couldn’t shut down the noise in her head about the work she should be doing around the house.

Once, she called my sister over to take her to the emergency room—but first she needed to give her little dog a bath. Later, when I flew down to help, she was bothered about the dust gathering on her teacups in the curio cabinet, but she couldn’t get out of bed. So, I brought the little treasures to her bedside and gently polished each one so that she could rest easier.

After she passed away, my sisters and I divided her assets. I was determined to use her savings only for things that she would’ve appreciated. New carpet. Fresh paint over the dirty little handprints on our family room walls. Anything that felt like it would help me clean up my domestic act.

But before I opened an IRA to deposit the rest, I strayed from my plan.

For as long as I could remember, I’d wanted a kayak, but it wasn’t something my mom would’ve wanted, enjoyed, or sat still for. I wrestled with the idea of using her money for something so purely mine. Something she wouldn’t have understood.

In the end, I bought the cheapest plastic kayak I could find at Dick’s Sporting Goods, along with matching paddles and a life jacket. I even added a cup holder because I was all in at that point, and cold beer seemed to be part of the vision.

It also occurred to me that it might be channeling my dad, the outdoorsman, instead—which I’m sure Birdy would not have appreciated, given their long-ago divorce. Still, I told myself that she had loved him once, so why not?

And I’ve never looked back.

I started by going to the little goldfish-bowl lake in the metro park in our northeast Ohio town. The first time I pushed off and felt gravity shift from the sandy bank to the buoyancy of the water, my heart lifted right along with it. There’s a quiet euphoria in drifting with nature that I feel down to my core.

The sky looks different somehow without my feet on the ground. I’ve discovered that I’m a bird watcher. If I’m stealth enough, the herons let me come close. When I’m not, they fly away to the sound of my apologies. There’s a raccoon that wades out from the north edge of a lagoon, and I sit quietly hoping to see him catch a fish. I usually end up tossing him an apple core because I’ve yet to see him catch anything.

These days, I leave the back seats of my SUV down from May through October so I can slide my kayak in and get out as often as I can. Sometimes I bring a book, tie off to a tree branch for a nap, and I’ve even been known to paint my fingernails—when else does life give you enough stillness for polish to dry?

One of my dear friends liked what she heard about my discoveries on the water, so she got a kayak and started joining me occasionally. One simple text and a “meet you in the middle” is all it takes for a Saturday afternoon to turn into a reset for both of us. We’ve long since agreed that what is said on the water stays on the water. Now it’s not just me, but her, who lets nature smooth out life’s kinks.

Here’s what I know … I can still hear my mom’s voice saying, Julie, sloooowwww down; you’re going to burn yourself out. I am every bit as high-strung as she was, and she could see it.

While she would never have spent hours drifting in a kayak, I like to think that she would appreciate the balance it gives to me. Usually, I pack a little picnic—she would’ve loved that; she was the queen of picnics even if she never lingered around a table for long.

Eventually, I come home and pick up my day where it left off. But on the water, I do something she never quite could—I sit still long enough to let things settle.

It’s something she gave me, even if she couldn’t find it for herself.