“Where is your mother???”

Liz here:

When I was maybe ten or eleven years old, I was out on a canoeing trip with my parents and brother and our family friends, the Applegates, making eight of us in all, on a Michigan river. It was a beautiful late summer day, pretty hot out, and as we rounded a bend we came across an old railroad bridge with a few teenagers standing atop of it. As we watched, they leaped off one at a time: Splash! Splash! Splash! They hit the deep water with yelps of glee.

They spotted our canoes and yelled out to us to come join them and take a leap off the old bridge. By the time we’d paddled up to it, they were back on top. “Come on!” they yelled. “Get up here!”

“I don’t think so,” Claudia Applegate, basically my second mom, hollered back. “Where is your mother??”

“At home, where she should be!” one of them yelled back. By then the rest of us were already laughing. Since then, the line has become sort of an inside joke with us; whenever one of us four kids does something a little rash (and we’ve done our fair share of jumping off northern Michigan cliffs, and other exciting things), our understanding moms will sigh and say, “Where is your mother?”

Well, today I jumped off a bridge of my own. Jen and I, and Jamie, Lewis, Steven, and some German guy who turned up went on over to the Waitangi road bridge this afternoon and took turns jumping off. It’s quite high; nothing crazy, but twenty-something feet I’d guess. The water below is super deep, though, and the Maori kids jump off all the time so we knew it was safe. We all climbed over the rail, stood on the trestles sticking out, and jumped off, a few times each. Man, it’s such a rush, that moment when you push off and you can see the water below you and feel the fall.

The whole time, though, I was thinking about Claudia, and what she’d be asking. Unfortunately, both my mother and my mom number two are back in Michigan, and much too far away. All I can do, for the moment, is tell them the stories - because they’re at home, where they should be.

This is a shout out to my family and the Applegates: I wish you guys were here to share in the adventures with me. I miss ‘Gate time very, very much.