Gary LeBel
Screen Doors
There where the shores of the lake narrowed like an hourglass it stood, forest green, large, well shaded, sprawling but stately, a camp for boys. The wrap-around porch had a number of screen doors, and if you happened to be passing by in your boat you could hear them slam as their charges ran in or out all summer long, a sound that when carried over water leaves a resonance that never completely fades away, one full of images like the allure of Proust’s cookie.
Were they rich kids their wealthy parents tossed away for the summer? Then, I never knew nor wondered about each boy’s provenance as I passed their camp in my small aluminum boat, slowly, almost at an idle, for a lake rules its summers with a natural democracy of joys and pleasures. No doubt there were bullies there, the painfully shy, the awkward, the loved and unloved, those who still wet their beds; and their young counselors, some impatient with younger boys and others gifted with an understanding beyond their years, happy to be employed for the summer at a place so rich in quiet mornings and, at twilight, steeped in liquid echoes.
***
One can only imagine what became of the boys and their counselors, whether or not they sometimes daydream about their days at camp as they sit at desks buried in phone calls and files, or chase fleeting reminiscences that stream in like a ray of light through a courtroom window to settle like a dragonfly on a plaintiff’s brief,
or while a man wielding a jackhammer or laying a length of pipe muses on the blue of a certain sky, of how the waters tasted, of friendships won and lost, the funerals he may have attended for those, whom lifelong, he’d brothered. . .
and not least those screen doors slamming, the lively sound of it traveling out through the still morning air when campers might chance to spot another boy trolling by in his small boat looking at them, hair down to his shoulders, clad in a tee shirt and trunks, curious for a moment but bent on another destination far down-lake, and throttling up to get there where the narrows begin to widen.
Delicious this day,
the heart's hard bread,
the dough within, soft and sour-sweet:
crust, let me always judge you
by your flour's worth
About the Author
Gary LeBel is an artist-poet living in the greater Atlanta area whose poems have appeared in journals throughout the USA, the UK, Japan, and India. He believes that art, or anything else worth doing, is a life-long pilgrimage.