Lacunae

I can see sunlight coming in through the windshield to reach me in the back seat of a pick up truck, and I know that we are on my paternal grandfather's farm in Perth, Ontario, but I do not recall being placed into the truck, or the look of the dirt track worn into the grass, filled with rocks. I cannot be sure that this memory corresponds to a fishing trip from my early childhood, but even in the event that it does I know nothing beyond this point—we have begun the journey to a lake I cannot now see; I was told we were going fishing, but in place of the lapping of water amongst the reeds I hear anti-freeze slap against the plastic walls of its prison.





*





The vantage point afforded to a child is frequently one where they are looking up, and so then it is of little surprise that the seat cushions, the carpeted floor and car mats below my feet, or even the persons seated next to me have no hold in this recollection, and, being as small as I must assume I was from the angle at which I viewed the backs of the driver and passenger seats, it follows that I possess now only the feeling of movement, watching an unchanging blue screen in front of me, without the image of a landscape approaching and then receding into the past.




*

From the height of the farmhouse bathroom window, from the top of the slope of the gravel driveway, I see the front yard of my grandfather's home as if looking down into a depression, a deceptively potent crater whose rim succeeds in obscuring the barn, wherein are kept the beef and milch kine in the winter, and the area directly behind the farmhouse, known to me perhaps only in photographs—but who can trust the veracity of these?—and those properties on the other side of the road (agrarian facades), and the cow pasture behind the barn and adjacent to the yard, or expanse of unkept field, or perhaps it is another property, or perhaps a lake.




*




On my grandfather's farm there were many cats, and once my allergy-induced asthma had moved from its latent state into an active one I could hardly spend more than a few hours there before being rushed to the hospital, and in the process of leaving the crater lake all memory of the farm and choking fits receded with it.

From Latin, “pool,” from lacus, “lake”.