First place: "An August Sunset" by Isabel Hogben

I’d seen the photos in the bottom bins of my grandparent’s storage unit that look just like tonight. The photos are the sort of faded that veil violent color, undetectable, yet undeniable. They’re taken on the same lawn of the same yacht club. Grandma, Catherine, stands in sunglasses, long and mousy, scowling on the starboard. She clutches a child to her boyish, navy and white striped chest. Pops, tanner than a pageant queen, in a squinty grin at the sun, dangles his legs off the boat.

Tonight, sixty years after those photos, five years after the Death of Catherine, and a year after the death of the baby boy, my uncle, she held in her arms, we look at the same skies. The sky blazes pinks over the marina. The wind hums a tune I know has graced this harbor every summer since Pops was my age, sixteen and running wild among the dinghies, the first son of the first Catholic family admitted to the club. He’s lived a million nights like this one. An oak blows above us in the breath of the song, exhaling summer greens in a soothing hush. Pops, my mother, and I sit in white lawn chairs and look out onto the harbor. It’s August and we are the only three left. It seems like everyone is dying these days but Pops tries not to think about that – it’s August and we clap as the sun dips beneath the horizon. Encore! Bravo! Same time again tomorrow? Sailboats, white and virginal, drift in and out of the dock, as my grandfather follows their wakes with blue eyed intensity, remembering.

“Do you remember how we named you?” Pops asks Mom, a smile playing on his lips. She turns to him. “Catherine and I were sitting on this lawn watching schooners come in. We saw the most beautiful boat and it was named Julia.”

“You named me after a boat?”

Pops laughs to himself and shakes his head, leaning back, dwarfed by his chair. The bones of his jagged shoulders jump up through his blue polo as he shakes, chuckling.

I have a polaroid of him sitting on the same green sixty years ago, thirty years old and six foot two, smiling at the camera. Pops, a lifelong sailor, was the only one of his friends to come off the races without melanoma. He mainlined three pills of beta carotene a day and escaped without skin cancer, cheating death for the second time.

The first was when he fell off a tractor. 19, a Yale football player, James broke his back in sixteen places and never recovered. Tonight, he’s shorter than me, five foot one, with orange prescriptions lined up like Rockettes, his once mighty frame, a D1 athlete, shrinking by the day

from acute spinal stenosis. He used to throw javelin.

“I guess we did. But it was a beautiful boat. We drank a lot.” He laughs again, taking a sip of his third glass of red, more of a painkiller than a pathology.

“After the war...” He begins again.

Something propels me up from the lawn chair. I feel the beatific course through my bones and organs: the gift of youth and the sunset before me, the expanse of it all. I excuse myself and bound across the lawn down to the beachy edge of the Sound.

My feet want to climb and my heart wants to sing. Sing Davidic praises, proclaim a song that echoes from the teahouse, to the lifeguard chairs. I am overwhelmed by the beauty of the Present.

I walk through the green eelgrass. It rises to my thighs in a long white sundress. Under the loose cloth, I feel my muscles tense, the strength of my legs and the beating of my heart. The health that stirs in me, the vitality yelling to be heard. I begin to scale a black crag that runs along the water.

I stand at the top of the rocks for minutes, looking out onto the bay, before I realize my feet are bleeding, red and bright onto the stone. I smile to myself and steadily descend, wincing, with my hands spread out like an eagle for balance. I run barefoot across the sand. When I return to the lawn chair, they’ve lowered the flag and Pops is staring at the empty pole. Mom has gone to fetch us drinks.

Tears stream down his face, running saltwater in freefall down the depths of his leathery cheeks. I’m concerned for him in the same way my mother is concerned during a government shutdown – when an institution shows weakness.

Of course, Pops showed it sometimes. In his frailty, in the daily sound of his cane falling on hardwood, in his medications piled throughout his bedroom and his books on preventing Alzheimers. But even crippled as he was, by grief and bodily contortion, my mom said hugging him was like hugging an oak tree.

I crouch by his chair and grab his wrinkled hand. He looks down at me with pink eyes, and then back up to the water.

“What’s wrong?”

He doesn’t respond for a while, looking off into the evening. He wipes his nose and eyes with a handkerchief from his pocket.

He answers: “Memories.”

I take his arm, help him up, and we walk to the car.

As we stumble at tortoise pace towards the parking lot, I see his answer everywhere. Shadows in boat shoes, friends of long ago attended funerals, wave goodbye to the two of us, who hobble. Yachts of more translucent whites drift across the marina, in a minute sunk and gone. I hear a Yaleman, with a living son and a living Catherine, sing shanties across the harbor, six foot two and strong, a black silhouette in a setting sun that was there then too. At the home we share, in a bathroom filled with nautical watercolors, my grandfather, almost ninety, the sailor who can’t sail anymore, bandages my feet.