Lake Ypsilon

POETRY

By Kathryn Llewellyn

My mother spots its blue dot on a guidebook map while Uncle-Bill-who-isn’t-really-our-uncle re-tells the story of my father picking up art school girls at ragers. We need an escape. It’s my family’s first and last trip together, all of us, adults, none of us experienced in hiking or reading signposts. Sun will set in an hour. My father wears loafers. But the trail appears flat, and Uncle Bill doesn’t want to hike, so we stroll into the trees. My father keeps several paces ahead, the distance widening as the incline rises, and my mother stops each returning hiker to ask How much farther? No one has an answer more precise than Not too much. Everything becomes trees on trees on trees. Through the craquelure of boughs, the sky blazes orange, and my father says we should turn back, better to forget it than risk getting lost in the dark. My mother says it’s just a little farther, but my sister has to pee, we end up back in the parking lot and debate if it’s possible we bypassed a lake without seeing it and promise we’ll try to find it again. But time passes, and Uncle Bill moves away, I have back surgery, and my mother

brings the failed hike up at Christmas dinner, if only to blame sunset and my father’s loafers. Another year passes. My mother claims to have found Lake Ypsilon on YouTube, and Look—it’s shallow and dumpy, as if that makes our not finding it ok. She says Lake Ypsilon looks like the neighbors’ duck pond. We’ve been staring at it every day of our lives. And as she re-hashes our errors—it dawns on me: the magic of Lake Ypsilon is not in finding it but in searching—and holding onto— all we imagine it could be.