September 16, 2026 Post by : Editorial Reflections

The bench at the end of our dock is not much to look at. It is made of pressure-treated lumber that has gone silver and rough from years of sun and rain, and one of the legs is shimmed with a flat rock I found on the shore the summer we built it. But it is, I have come to believe, the most important piece of furniture I own.

We built it the year my father died. I don't remember deciding to build it. I remember needing to do something with my hands, something that would end, something that would leave a visible mark on the world. So I bought lumber and lag bolts and a box of galvanized screws, and I sat at the end of the dock with a circular saw and a level, and I made a bench.

A Place to Put the Weight Down

Grief is a strange weight because it doesn't sit on your shoulders the way you expect. It sits lower, somewhere in the chest, and it makes everything else harder to carry. The bench gave me a place to put it down for a while. I would go out there in the evenings, after the light had gone soft, and I would sit and look at the water and not try to feel better.

That was the important part, I think. Not trying to feel better. The lake didn't ask me to. It just did what it always does, which is to hold the sky and the trees and the occasional heron, and to move in small, patient ways that have nothing to do with me. There is a kind of comfort in being irrelevant to something beautiful.

Over the months, I started to notice things from that bench. The way the wind changes direction around four in the afternoon. The way the minnows gather in the shallows when the sun is high. The way the loons call to each other across the water in a voice that sounds like it has been lonely for a very long time and has made peace with it. I started to bring a notebook, then stopped bringing it, because writing things down felt like trying to keep them, and some things you are not meant to keep.

The Arithmetic of Sitting Still

Here is what I have learned from sitting on that bench, season after season. That the days add up differently when you are not counting them. That a life by the water is not slower than a life anywhere else, but it is more honest, because the water does not pretend to be anything other than what it is. That grief and gratitude can sit side by side on the same rough planks, and neither one cancels the other out.

The bench is older now. So am I. The rock under the short leg has settled into the sand, and I have stopped noticing the slight tilt. My father has been gone for years, and I can talk about him now without the weight settling into my chest. But I still go out to the bench most evenings, not because I need to, but because it has become the place where I remember how to be a person who is not in a hurry.

If you ever find yourself at the end of a dock, with a bench and a lake and an hour you didn't plan for, I hope you sit down. I hope you let the water do what it does. I hope you put the weight down, just for a while, and find that the world is still there when you pick it up again.

• Share:

Back to blog

Small Business Owners Make it Happen in 2025

Small Business Owners Make it Happen in 2025