Arrive.

Eat waffles on Sunday. Spoon extra berries on top. Admire the colors; think about how expensive this portion would be in New York. Consider how you simply went to the driveway and coaxed them off the branches of wild-growing bushes. Think about how the sheep crowded around to watch.

Siri’s Mom thinks that bunnies proliferate in large numbers as a gift to carnivorous animals, like hawks. She explains this, hands folded, very serious facial expressions.

Leftover onion pie for breakfast on Monday. Eat fresh yogurt, watch the surface cream crack like an ice pond. Spend the rest of the day sweating onion and feeling bad for the people standing close to you.

Siri’s Mom is obsessed with ospreys. She watches live video feeds of their nests, posted by preservation groups, in Missoula, Shanghai, Lisbon. She can identify each location by the background noise of its train traffic: the efficient grind of passenger cars in Latvia, the meaty groan of industrial rail in Moscow. “The osprey,” she says proudly, “is a world bird.” Take a ride in the boat with the cold wind rising, a sea plane cruising in overhead.

Sailboats list on the horizon, willowy and pale. To pass the time, read something familiar and good. Let the days run like blissful milk.

Tell her you are not coming home, after all. Her expression will hang there, dull and forgotten, like an old shirt.

Huddle around the fire. Read ancient issues of National Geographic to each other. Marvel at the time when there were still things to be discovered. Acknowledge that many of these articles are replicas of ones you saw printed just last week.

Go to the post office. This is a 45 minutes to walk through silky meadows and close-growing berry bushes. Tuck your arms into your sleeves. Avoid the hornets nest, the left-hand side.

Check for mail (it comes three days a week.) Get nothing. Spend an hour pawing through old, piled copies of the New Yorker and Harper’s. Look for the issue with the recently reprinted Shirley Jackson story. Fail. Instead, find pieces by Lorrie Moore and John McPhee and Gary Shteyngart. Feel the rippling jewel pleasure of their many different names, then the anticipation that is not having read things yet.

Think: What does a magazine exist for? It is not for remembering. Just for building. Building what? Momentum.

Siri’s Mom used to party on Stuart Island. Instead of socializing, she would smoke joints and drink beers while methodically plucking mosquitoes off of her exposed body. She would pile the corpses on the table beside her. When the pile was the height of a quarter stood on end, she’d get in her boat and row home.

Think: anything can be a story! You can just write it and make it so. Be thrilled with delight and possibility.

Siri’s Mom says she wants to be on the first spaceship to colonize Mars. She fears she won’t be allowed because of her advanced again. Reassure her that she is disposable enough to experiment with.

Fall asleep by ten, rocked by the calm bay waves. Wake at dawn to get going again. Watch the dog circle the dock warily, bristling with salt and suspicion.

Mix things with rum.

Forget to put the rain fly on your tent. Wake up at 6:47am, swimming. Go inside, stoke the fire, and dry off slowly while watching the storm pass. By 1 PM, get to work.

Forget the extra can of propane. Run out when the potatoes are half-cooked. Eat them anyway, with lots of ketchup. Watch the sun go down. Abandon the plate in order to go swimming. End up swimming back to the boat. End up leaving the plate and the leftover potatoes.

Forget about other things. Land. People.

Realize that you have the best friend in the world when she lets you sleep in until 6:20am and then wakes you with a warm cup of coffee, even though she never drinks it herself, and doesn’t really know how to make it. Feel warm all over before you even take the first sip.

Watch the sun rise on the dock. Accept the leftover boiled crab that a fisherman brings up to you in a deep metal pot. Break off the tips of each claw to pick meat with. Huddle around the pot like homeless people, eating and laughing. Turn the tape player up so the fisherman can hear the strains of Joni Mitchell’s “Carey” while he works. Tip your imaginary hat back when he gratefully acknowledges this gesture.

Run away. Become pirates.

Siri’s Mom says…

Sail all day. Forget what days are. Notice time passing swiftly. Stop noticing time at all. Mix more things with rum.

Feel happy, feel in love. Watch the dog get old. Carry him to the dock when he can no longer hop. Braid your friend’s hair when it gets too long to stay out of the way. Pin it behind her ears on each side and admire her face.

Watch the sun rise, watch the sun fall. Get a feel for the tides. Throw the outdated tide charts overboard — your intuition is better now, anyway.

Hear that Siri’s Mom passed away, this time last year. Wonder where the time has gone. Hear that the memorial was on Petros Island, at sunset.

Drive to Petros. Dock near the lighthouse. Stand at the very edge of the point, where the tide runs in over the rocks. Put “The Last Time I Saw Richard” on the tape player. Light cigarettes. Leave two beers, full and open, on the shore. Salute.

Drive off, into the sun.

Think: it will be our turn, soon enough.