The Beavers

How could I have forgotten?

A memory long forgotten came back with such ease it was if it had been under the surface all along. I heard the frogs I know only of glistening summer evenings and who usher periods of transformation. I felt the cold smooth stone upon which I sat. I watched the dark aquatic tendrils tug at the reeds and remembered. I remembered the frogs, I remembered the stone, I remembered the stream. And I remembered her. I was back there again.

I was 12, sitting on a bed of white quartz at the edge of the river behind my Abuelita’s house. I had dirt in my shoes and tangles in my hair, but I heard the chorus of frogs and was content. I had spent the day tracing trails along the beaver dam and had ended here, watching her tend the banks of the water that moved through her land. She slowly waded through the dense waters, rearranging stones and waterlogged sticks. She brushed aside the reeds where the water had pooled. She sang as she moved, using words I did not understand but whose meaning was familiar. I moved as she moved and sang as she sang, tenderly taking in the mysterious gesture I witnessed.

The water no longer moved as it should, she said. The beavers who once tended these waters disappeared earlier that spring sometime after the city drain pipes appeared. Pipes that carried “hallooooo” through their echoey chambers and devoured the pebbles we dropped in them without a sound. It was the beavers who had guided the flow of the water, but they were now gone. And without them the river was starting to change, moving too fast and eroding the riverbanks in some places and pooling into stagnant reservoirs in others. And so she picked up the work of tending the flow of the river. She watched the beavers and moved as they moved, and I watched her and moved as she moved. Together we hummed and swayed, tending the river and letting the river tend us.

We spoke two different languages, but I understood her. Sometimes these faded memories even feel as if they’re in another language. They rise and fall, but they are still within me. She and me at the bank of the river amongst a chorus of changeling frogs.