This is Mink Island

Still water, the buzz of bees, lazy seagulls and a few wild geese -- yesterday's trip to Mink Island was a dip back into childhood. We picnicked at the flat rock table my grandmother favored, cracking our hard-boiled eggs on the gray granite and eating them with hunks of brown grainy bread and butter, tiny sweet tomatoes and cold slices of radish and cucumber. We walked along the top of the island barefoot, in a line, with the dog leading us. A ribbon of duck rested on the water just east of the island. Hundreds of them. In the sun. After lunch we lay on the rocks and played word games and laughed and I remembered being in that very place where there is hardly a human imprint, every year of my life. It is wild and it is perfect. Rock, rowan, aspen, gulls, mink, wild lupines, raspberries, yellow lichen, oyster catchers, crab shells, reed, velvet moss, tiny strawberries, the calcified bones of sea birds.