A YEAR WITHOUT TIME

I grabbed the railing as I headed down the narrow stairs in the cottage. The phone rang its third ring and Diva lifted her head to inquire. I pulled on the railing as I jumped to the right of the landing, into the kitchen. A fourth ring and I grabbed it off the hook just before it went to the answering machine. I wondered if it was Mom calling back.

"Hello?" I said.

Diva settled back onto her bed in the living room, her tail taking one ceremonial thump as she assessed that all was under control.

"Jenny, I want to canoe the Missouri River before I die. Want to come?" Bill's voice was a familiar one. I grinned before knowing it.

"Bill," I said, "that's a great idea."

I had dropped the -ny ending on my name years earlier, using the shorter "Jen," somehow thinking it allowed me to escape, at least partially, the taunts of childhood. With Bill, however, it had stuck, and I didn't mind. I was thirteen when we met, he stealing my mother's heart a few years after a quiet divorce. He was canoeing the great Mississippi, and we lived in a small riverside town. The first night he came to dinner was the only night of my life my mother prodded, "Don't you think it's time to go to bed, Jenny?" I awoke to find the car gone, Mom and Bill taking in the Midwest sunrise. They married a year later and my mother had found her mate; Bill is the only person I know who can fit her wanderlust-filled life, a life she had passed on to me.

I shifted my weight onto my other foot, the linoleum cold against my bare feet. "When are you going to do it?" I asked. Having just gotten off the phone with Mom, I wished I could have heard the route they had taken to get to this idea.

"Not me Jenny, us. I think the four of us should do it together, do the whole thing, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico."

He sounded like a little boy, anticipation measuring itself against imagination. I could picture him grinning on the other end of the phone line, his crooked smile giving way to a full-toothed grin. Bill had watched me grow out of girlhood; he had been the adult who found a fit into a girl's life, at the most awkward time of adolescence. Now his seventy-eight years gave way to my twenty-nine, and I wondered if he was serious.

"So what do you think?" he said, "How long do you think it would take?"

I heard Donna move from the smallest bedroom into the bathroom upstairs, her delicate steps making the floorboards creak. "I don't know Bill, how long is it?"

"I'm not sure, let's see, the Mississippi is just over 2000 miles, but the Missouri River starts somewhere in Montana and then meets the Mississip' just above St. Louis. If we went all the way to the Gulf, I think it would be about 4000 miles. Do you think we could do it in a year?"

This is where I began to measure who Bill thought I was against who I was becoming. The past year had found me in a new relationship, I was just completing the first month of a new job – the first job in my life that actually had a salary, not the hourly wages I was earning before – and Donna and I were just getting to know each other's wishes and dreams. She had not mentioned canoeing the Missouri River as one of her dreams, and I was trying to control my wanderlust.

"I think it could be done, Bill, but would Mom do it, too?"

I knew, and Bill knew, that this was a silly question. Cate Allen would do anything, be anything, go anywhere, just because a) she wanted to, b) somebody dared her to, or c) God forbid, someone told her she couldn't. My mother would be in a canoe on the Missouri River for a year just because she knew of no one else who was doing it. That was her way.

"Yes," he said, a smirk in his voice, "I think I could talk her into it."

Now it was down to me, and Donna. My life had been measured with a wanderlust yardstick. As I grew older and moved out of the house I realized that not everyone moved every year, and most families didn't sit down together during Christmas break and wonder where they would be next Christmas, asking each other what adventures the coming year would bring. Donna had been reared in three houses, all within thirty miles of each other. She was the yin to my yang, and somehow it was working. The first year we spent together taught me that I could build a career, that maybe the wandering was more costly than I knew, and that indeed, it was with Donna that I wanted to be. There was, however, a glint of doubt in me, that longing to make it over the next hill, just to see what was there. My wanderlust was a part of me that brought me many adventures, and a sense of pride. I was more my mother's daughter than I wanted to admit.