By Adrienne Garrison
@adrie.garrison

I grew up along the bend of a river, and all my childhood I took instruction from my uncles, my father, and even my younger brother on how to skip stones. They described what rock to choose: flat, round, smooth. They showed me how to hold it in my hand loosely, fingers wrapping the edges, and how to let it go. But it never worked. I was always trying too hard. I couldn’t master the elegant carelessness of my older cousins. It seemed as though they could look out at the spot the rock would skip before it even left their hand. So confident. And mine would just splash and sink. I would invariably give up and search for mussel shells instead, their pearlescent interiors so unlikely under all that mud. 

***

The pandemic was startling in the way it wiped our routines off the table. The way we spent our days, the people we shared our lives with, the mundane errands we dreaded were all turned upside-down. For my children, four and nearly two at the time, the clearest change was the yellow caution tape wound around their favorite playground, barring their entry. Without access to the slides and the swings, they settled on the creek that cut through our local park. They tossed stones from the bank for hours, unphased by Indiana’s damp, grey spring.

That’s how, 25 years later, I found myself searching the ground for a stone—round, flat, and smooth—that might do something improbable. 

As I paced the creek bank, I built up a little cache of perfect skipping stones in my hand, lobbing them out now and then at various angles. Theo scooped up handfuls of pebbles and tossed them overhand into the creek, jumping in delight as they rained down on the water’s surface. Penny dislodged small boulders and heaved them in, sending out ripples that startled the family of ducks on the bank. 

As unlikely as it seemed, the absence of what little childcare I did have made our days seem more expansive somehow. Those two-and-a-half hours of preschool came at a high price: rushed mornings, cajoling, and traffic, not to mention the energy crash they faced in the afternoon, grouchy and taxed from their time at school. Our days seemed suddenly full of opportunity for those simple moments of connection I’d been longing for, even with so many options taken away. 

I tried to appear aimless as I bent to pick up rock after rock, winging them out into the water. An hour later, hands cold and ready for lunch, we each found one more stone to toss in. Squatting down at their level, I released the cool, round orb and immediately felt a difference. The rock bounced a few times on the top of the water and disappeared. 

“Did you see that?!” I shrieked, overjoyed, and we all danced around. I tried a few more times and found that I couldn’t repeat it until I was lower, down at their level, looking out over the water, sending the stone right across the rippling surface of the stream.

We spent weeks at the banks of that stream, each of us perfecting our toss. Spring turned to summer, and life seemed to blink on and off as the world opened a bit and closed back up again. When we stopped at the creek a full year later, smashing the remnants of slushy snow with our boots, I couldn’t quite find the technique that had become second nature months prior. But I wasn’t bothered. We had less time for streams those days. The parks were open. The vaccine was coming my way. We were optimistically booking flights for the summer. 

In June and July of this year, we tramped through the creek with a new passion: catching crawdads. Or trying to, anyway. If the pandemic wasn’t quite in our rear view, we had every hope that it would be soon, and that is why August knocked me so completely off my feet. We returned from a week at Lake Michigan, and my husband, a physician in the emergency department, couldn’t find beds for his patients within a three-hour radius. It changed that fast. Friends with children my children’s age shared how COVID had ransacked their home, leaving even vaccinated parents laid up by this worst variant. 

Quickly—so quick as to make me dizzy—our family drew in again. My husband was working more shifts than ever before, covering docs who were out sick. When he came home he was crushed and bruised in new ways. I sat on the porch with him in the blue dusk of summer after a particularly long shift as story after story came tumbling out, receiving whatever I could so that he would be light enough to go back and do it again the next day. 

Later that month, I mustered a great effort and packed the kids up for a trip to the park, yearning to give them some slice of normalcy, with preschool and church and anything indoors once again wiped from our schedule. Almost immediately after arriving, a little girl befriended my daughter. They skipped off, playing… sometimes too closely for my comfort. Sometimes dodging into the little playhouse or settling into the tube to talk. I moved closer, murmuring a warning about space, about needing to put on her mask. Then the grandmother initiated some game of surprise, delighting them by shouting “Boo” when they got within a few feet. I was sweating, heart pulsing, ashamed that all I could think about was particles. Ashamed to be weighing out a moment of childhood simplicity against the image in my mind’s eye of her lying in the hospital, as white as the sheet beneath her, tubes laced through her nose. 

I was never made to hold these images, but I can’t allow the man that I love to carry them all on his own. 

When Penny ran by, I handed her a mask. At the same moment, Theo suggested we visit another part of the park. I suppose that the grandmother only saw me masking and walking away, so she barked out, “What? I have a mask in my car. Will that make you happy?”

I turned, too stunned to speak, shaking my head. And then: “My little guy just wants to go to the park down the hill.” I waved her off, snapping tersely at my daughter that we could only stay a few more minutes. The eventual walk to the car marked the first of many times that I have cried in public lately, and I am perplexed to find myself grieving the loss of these small talismans of regular life, even after all we have collectively endured. You would think I would be used to it by now. 

On a rare evening escape from the house, I drove to the creek, swatting away mosquitos and breathing a small thanks for the lights lining the path. I’d meant to go for a run. I’d meant to call a friend. But I found myself walking that familiar trail and stopping, gravel crunching beneath my feet, to stare into the black ribbon of water winding under the bridge. It was too dark to look for stones, and I had no memory of elegant release. No weightless feeling. I bent, scraping my fingers all the way into the sand below, scooping up handfuls of rocks and flinging them across the stream into the woods beyond. The empty-nesters and day workers out on their walks and jogs just slid past me in the near dark, this crazed woman angry at the world and more empty than ever before.

I left the windows down in the car on my way home, breathing the humid air deeply, my ears tuned to the continuous song of cicadas following me through the trees. I thought about the impossibility, the inevitability of hope, and though I knew I couldn’t skip a stone if I tried, I remembered those moments just after each one was released. How the weight and shape of it left my hand and soared over the surface of the water. How it touched down once, twice, three times and then sank below, settling in with the crawdads and pill bugs. How each one had found a home beside all the fine skipping stones cast out before it.