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endless stream of distant relatives. How they all managed to end up
on the same island in the middle of nowhere at exactly the same
time, I did not know.
I jumped up onto the dry wood of the dock and pulled the canoe
in, wrapping the yellow rope around and over the cleat.
“What do we do with the paddles?” I asked.
“Just leave them on the dock,” Chip shrugged.
I stepped into my flip flops, wrapped a towel around my waist
and started up the dock, past the boat shed, towards the rusted
ladder up to dry land.
“Stop!”
I froze. Chip tensed. Grandfather stormed out of the boat shed,
shoulders squared and face tight.
“What are you doing!” he barked, picking up the paddles,
brandishing them like a weapon.
“What do you think you are doing?!”
I turned away from the ladder.
“Listen here,” he said, voice quick and sharp like gunfire. “Listen
here. You have to look after your equipment.” Each word was
punctuated by a violent hand gesture. “Your equipment could be
the difference between life and death.”
There was something hungry in his watery blue eyes eyes. I
couldn’t speak.
“Put things away when you use them damn it. How long have you
lived here, Chip? How long?”
Chip opened his mouth. Then closed it.
“Get out of my sight!”
We hurried back up onto the grass. The ground stabilised
beneath me. When I looked back he was staring sightlessly into the
water, cradling the paddles against his chest like a new born baby.
’
Here’s what my Mother told me: hundreds and hundreds of years
agomy forefather stepped onto a ship and sailed towards a unknown
world. That man, whose name my mother abandoned upon
marrying, married and had children, and those children had children.
And so on and so forth, the family tree twisted downwards, thick,
gnarled and branching, anchoring itself into the land.
On Sunday morning everyone went down to an old wooden
Protestant church overlooking the water, surrounded by oak trees
On The Floor
Of The World
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