“I forget you’re actually good at this,” Elizabeth admits, once I have gotten about a third of the crib built without much difficulty. “Remember when you decided to patch up that old canoe you found in the swamp?”

I laugh, having almost forgotten myself. I was fourteen when I found the abandoned canoe, the bottom largely rotted out from the damp, the oars splintered and stained. I spent over an hour dragging the thing back to the house like a prize, beaming with excitement when I finally deposited it on the wild grass. Elizabeth was less than impressed; she had come outside, taken a brief glance at the thing, and wrinkled her nose in disgust.

She didn’t believe I could fix it enough to make it usable, but I found tools in the basement and bought some wood at the hardware store, and somehow I taught myself, through trial and error, how to patch up a canoe. By summer’s end, I was taking it out onto the rivers through the swamp, and eventually Elizabeth’s jealousy at my adventures bade her join me, where together we sailed along the darksome waters, sometimes pulling up the oars and simply letting ourselves drift. I believe that is where we spent the most time sharing secrets and desires, things we never would have shared with each other in the house. Secrets which, in the true fashion of a private refuge, never left the sacred swamp with us but disappeared into the air. I don’t know how we managed not to use them against each other later, but things were different in the swamp than in the house, which would remember everything we divulged. I imagine that if we glided into those waters today, we might find our childhood secrets whispering through the air still, in a kind of magical remembrance.

I hardly remember what those secrets were, today. My secret fears, maybe, of time getting away from me, of people never taking me seriously, of failing to become what I truly wanted—to be a revered historian on the Great Dismal Swamp, to get my PhD and have my celebrated writings published by well-respected journals, to take eager grad students on archaeological explorations. I think of my student, Valerie, who wanted just this, and something sour curls up inside me. What were Elizabeth’s canoe-secrets? I wish I could remember. Things that revealed her hidden vulnerabilities, her humanity, her true self.

I miss that old canoe.

“I remember,” I say at last. “Maybe I should have been a carpenter.”

“A carpenter from Carpenter,” she murmurs, recalling the school we attended as children, Carpenter Elementary. We share a grin.

“Why do you suppose they called it that?”

She shrugs. “Who knows? Did they want us all to become carpenters?”

“Trying to bring good-paying, blue-collar jobs back to Virginia.”

“Don’t kid,” she warns, though she is smiling. “There are probably still people in town who believe they’re going to bring coal mining back.”

“Oh, but it will be clean this time.”