My father taught us how to skip stones
on Lake Mendota,
on the pond near our home,
and everywhere we traveled,
but I never succeeded in matching his skill.
His stones invariably skipped three or four,
sometimes five or even six times
across the surface of the water.
I kept trying
at every body of water with a pebbled shoreline,
but years later,
long after he was gone,
when I was teaching my own children to skip stones,
I was still lucky if my rock
jumped two or three times.
More often than not,
it went plunk
and sank to the bottom of the lake.

I never saw what happened
below the water’s surface.
But when the stone,
after five skips or none,
disappeared from sight,
it settled on the same ground
that lay beneath every other skipping spot.
Every body of water,
whether large or small, moving or still,
its bottom—
sand, muddy, rocky, soft or solid—
was part of the same earth on which I stood
as I skipped those stones,
and all the drops of water in all of them
cycled through the same air
and through the same seas.

Like the grief from untimely death,
and every other other source of pain and sorrow in my life,
everything was, and remains,
connected.