I keep remembering Sunday. Thunderstorms were forecast, but they held off for the parade. I got sunburn on my shoulders.

I keep pulling out the photograph of Steve standing behind me, his elbow around my shoulder, hand on my chest. It was our first time out together. We had met two weeks before.

The rain finally came that evening when we went with friends to buy food from concession stands along the sidewalk. We took shelter on the doorstep under the sign of Pegasus bar. I didn't have a shirt on, and the rain felt cold on my hot shoulders.

When you take Ecstasy it's dangerous to drink alcohol. The combination can make you sick.

E makes you feel energetic. You want to dance all night. Some people want to have sex all night. You sweat a lot. It's important to drink plenty of water. You go to some nightclubs and nobody is drinking alcohol, only water. You wonder how they make money.

Now when I'm dancing I prefer to drink water anyway. My energy lasts longer. I wonder if the bartenders think I'm on E. I haven't taken that stuff in six months. I have enough fun without it.

When I read Timothy Findley's Spadework I imagined the beautiful Polish man looking like the blond butcher in the deli across the street. When he bought the building several years ago he mowed the lawn and I watched for half an hour. I have never seen him up close.

Today I went and bought corned beef. As I turned to leave he came through the door, looked me in the face and nodded.

His eyes are not the usual blue. They are a shocking aquamarine, the colour of water along Georgian Bay where limestone cliffs plunge into the abyss.

Blistering sun fills the city streets. I walk from downtown to my friend's place in the afternoon. Dark clouds mount upon the horizon, but they're destined to disperse southward, never bringing any rain to relieve the sticky Ontario heat.

On the way I cross Gordon Street bridge. The river has been held back to make an elegant, dark, languid canal between the flood walls. Giant silver maples arch over the banks, cooling corridors of park grass under their boughs. In the bright distance an ancient stone bridge spans the channel. I take photographs to remind me of the verdant coolness.

I make an unplanned outing to Toronto, visiting online friends I have never met in person.

Saturday afternoon I go downtown and get a table under in a sidewalk café. I order a pint of ale and escargot. A young man at the next table is insisting that he can't swim.

"I'll teach you," his friend says.

"I've tried," the young man replies. "Nobody can teach me."

"If I can teach six-year-olds, I can teach you."

Going back to my friend's house I feel a few drops of rain, but that's all. It still isn't enough to ease the humidity.

The friends I'm visiting have a strange house. Danny says the old bathtub didn't fit the washroom. The toilet was squeezed in a corner so when you sat there, your leg was pressed against the air vent.

They got rid of the tub and installed a new shower head. But the only enclosure is a plastic curtain on a rod hanging from the ceiling. When you shower, water runs across the tile floor. There is a drain in the middle.

On this hot weekend, I get the floor wet often because Danny and I keep going back to bed together.

Finally the rain comes. Earth and sky turn tones of grey. The street shines like steel and traffic hisses beneath my office window.

This weather, though welcome, makes me sluggish and taciturn. I don't want to feel this way, not today. I have a coffee date with Steve this afternoon and want to impress him. I need to feel sexy.

I wash the dishes, fold and put away laundry, and take another load down to the basement. Murky, soapy water gyrates with my shorts, muscle shirts and underwear in the machine, washing out the salt sweat from hot weekend days.

For two nights I am visiting friends who own a bed and breakfast in Warkworth. This morning I took the train from Guelph to Cobourg, where Bob picked me up. We drove for half an hour into the Northumberland Hills.

Warkworth is a quaint village of 700 people. Mostly artists and farmers. Brick store fronts high and flat as billboards line the main street, typical of a thousand Ontario towns. Unlike Guelph, situated on the confluence of two rivers, this has no water anywhere in sight. I wonder how people originally decided to build a village in this particular spot.

Bob went out to water the garden. It's an essential part of country life.

At Poplar Bluff, where I grew up, the golf course next door always let Dad use water from their lines for our lawns. Early every morning the owners would come down to turn on the pump that drew water from Lake Erie. Dad would go outside in his pyjamas and move hoses around for our lawn sprinklers. We didn't have to waste precious well water.

The sprinklers on the golf course were far more powerful, sending white jets across the parched fairways, with rainbows in them.

On the train ride home I am again impressed by how much time the railway spends running adjacent to Lake Ontario. Many of Ontario's main routes of transportation have these vast, watery vistas with open horizons. In every direction you turn there is a Great Lake.

Their molecules seep up into the atmosphere, saturating it, drenching us in humidity throughout the summer, bringing storms in winter.

I get off the train in Toronto, take the subway to Queen Street, then mount the stairs into city air. Summer clouds are dropping moisture on concrete. I have to pull out my umbrella.

At the bathhouse, the showers are always running. After each visit from a stranger, I go wash up, then return to my room. After three or four showers, my towel gets uncomfortably damp, so I exchange it for another at the desk.

I won't have the freedom to do this much longer. In a couple days I'll pick up my daughters and get busy with them for four weeks. Then I have to be responsible.

Tonight isn't as much fun as I had hoped. I contemplate one more shower, but instead pull my clothes on and head for the bus.

I am going away for several weeks to be with my daughters. We will stop back here for a few days, but mostly we will spend the next four weeks at the cottage and camping. It is a major transition I must go through every summer, from a solitary bachelor to a fulltime single father.

Sylvie is coming over to water my plants while I'm away. In the morning I go and get an extra front door key made for her.

My blue Plumbago is blooming gloriously. It seems a shame to leave it with no one to enjoy it.

And if ever I return it will be in the spring,
just to see the water glide
and hear the nightingale sing.

Wherever the words of that song were written must have been a beautiful place. Here at Lake Fletcher the water glides, too. I sit on the dock in the falling evening light. In the distance a solitary thunderhead catches the pink light of evening. The lake and sky above it are still. Ripples on the distant surfaces create the impression that the water is indeed gliding. The light of the sky shimmers in the dark reflections of trees.

In the shallows beneath the tree boughs, the water is dark brown, the colour of the bottom muck. Where sunlight breaks through, green plants sprout amid the decomposing detritus of fallen leaves and tree branches. In places the light catches on bare patches where my children have waded and stirred away the light organic layer. Underneath, the sand is greyish gold, with coarse granite stones pink with feldspar. On the open lake, the surface is azure as the sky, with tufts of white cloud. Below the far shore lies a reflected shadow, green as cedars, pines, maples, hemlocks and birches.

A phone call from my mother. She wants me to change. She says she is too old to change. This is a basic human problem: wanting things different, but unwilling to lift a finger. This spirit of complaint is lodged firmly in my family. They taught me to wait and watch for the world to change. I am drowning in my own passivity in the middle of the lake, regretting that no one ever taught me to swim. I'm afraid I can only go a few strokes further. All I can do is keep telling myself to keep it up.

Heavy rain fell all yesterday afternoon. This morning I walked down to the dock and found little more than an inch sitting in the bottom of the canoe and motorboat. It seems there should be more, like they should have sunk.

The dark leaf mould along the path is sodden. Tiny puddles lie on the arms and seats of the outdoor chairs. The surface of the lake is washed clean. The air is clear, cool and fresh, but the sky is still an expressionless grey, as if it can't decide whether to break or dampen another day of our spirits.

The barbecue is not my area of expertise, but last night I grilled some rib-eye steaks to perfection.

We got home from shopping in Huntsville in time for dinner. I put a large pot of water on the stove to boil three cobs of sweet corn. While the barbecue heated up, I sautéed mushrooms over a low flame. After the steaks went on the grill, I slid corn into the pot, then steamed some green beans. By the time the vegies were ready, the juices had risen to the seared surface of the meat. They were just pink inside. Delicious!

This morning is nearly perfect, except a little too breezy and cool. The wind tears the lake surface to blue rags. Small clouds march across the sky. Their framented reflections get elongated like marble pillars over the breadth of water. A solitary loon slides swiftly through the channel opening on a driven current.

Here in the sheltered bay is sanctuary. My daughter comes to sit on bleached boards in sunlight. A small dragonfly lands on the cuff of my sweatshirt. His eyes are the colour of emeralds.

Ripples make lapping music under maple boughs in glaucous shadows along the shoreline.

Snorkeling is like descending into another dimension. You can hear nothing but the subdued thunder of water flowing past your ears, the distant sloshing of your flippers, and the loud Darth Vader suck and sigh of breath through your tube.

The water of Lake Fletcher is honey brown under sunlight. The soft bottom muck is diffuse, an inexact boundary between water and substrate. Apparently it is full of sacrophagous worms.

Around a rock pile, a school of minnows watches me and my children. The corneas of their eyes are pinkish-orange. Their tails have two matching, brilliant spots like underwater flares.

After my daughters were in bed, I pried open the sliding door and stuck my nose out to smell the night air. An unseen creature raised an alarming squeak, scrambled up the yellow birch. I went outside.

On the dock I found magic: the sky encrusted with gems, some dangling so low I could almost reach them. The pulsing moan of bullfrogs. Fireflies lying languidly on the dock. Indistinct echoes ringing across the water.

Heading back, I startled the mystery creature again. This time, with the beam of my flashlight, I captured the glistening berry eyes of a flying squirrel.

It has been rainy and chilly since yesterday morning. The girls and I had swum together every day since arriving at the cottage on July 13, but yesterday I went alone, briefly, just to freshen up.

My parents have arrived. After brunch I'm driving back to Guelph with my daughters for a few days. I look forward to a good shower. The soap I've been using up here leaves a film on my skin. but it's more than the proper cleansing of shower gel I anticipate. The bathroom provides more degrees of privacy than the cottage with its open ceiling.

This morning I phoned Elora Quarry to see if it is open for swimming. I had planned to take the girls there this afternoon. Then I realized we have been swimming in nicer water for the past ten days. What's so special about Elora?

It is a place of special memories. During that first terrible summer after the separation, when my wife was trying to restrict my access to the girls, I took them to the quarry for the first time on a brilliant afternoon. They were two and four. We went back many times over the next few years.

The dryer in the basement has been broken for six months and the landlord hasn't fixed it. When I'm here alone I can do all my laundry in small single loads and hang it around the apartment. That doesn't work with my daughters. I had accumulated four loads since last week. We had to go to a laundromat yesterday.

I enjoy watching washers that load from the front. You can see the water rising inside the glass, like you're in a submarine descending. Then the clothes start swirling, making soapy smears.

Meanwhile, we ate lunch at McDonald's across the street.

Yesterday we went to Stratford Festival. It was the first performance I have seen there in several years. Before the show I took the girls down to the river. A young man gave Brenna a slice of bread so she could feed the swans. She found a big white feather and asked me to keep it in my pocket.

We saw The King and I, about the governess to the King of Siam. It carries an ironic reference to Uncle Tom's Cabin. Eliza the slave girl escapes across the frozen river amid a flurry of snowflakes, like white swan feathers.

We have come to Poplar Bluff Beach on Lake Erie, the place where I grew up. It is high summer. The trees are full and round, the grass is lush. The wren bubbles with laughter, the red-winged blackbird gurgles with territorial ferocity, the cardinals and sparrows sing, and all the bird songs drown in the lusty gasp of waves on the beach. The onshore breeze smells sweet. Sunlight glitters over the crests at midday. My daughters go picking among stones, finding lost and worn treausres. I am wrapped in the rhythmic sound of waves, the pulse that measured my childhood.

Last night we watched The Secret Garden. Then I had to play piano: Chopin's posthumous nocturne which is the theme throughout that movie.

Meanwhile, Brenna went outside and ran through the sprinkler in her clothes while dusk fell.

It brought back fragmented memories of my own childhood, playing with the Mannings and Tracey Kennedy. Memories of rainbows in the mist, the pelt of water against my skin, grass clippings and sand stuck to my feet and tracked into the house. Sand on my beach towel. Mulberry stains on my soles.

Getting aroused when I peeled off my wet bathing suit.

After the girls go to bed I share intimacies with the lake in darkness. This lover, Erie, is unlike my tender, mysterious Lake Fletcher. The wind is torrid. Waves crash in shadows. I dare not swim alone.

Friday I stripped and lay on the pale sand. When I arched, it gently rasped the small of my back and buttocks. I took handfuls and let it fall, kissing my nipples and thighs.

Last night I intended to stay clothed, but the sultry wind seduced me. Walking, I tugged my t-shirt off. The air ravished my shoulders and chest. It was enough.

When we arrived four days ago, the shore was a soup of brown plant material.

Saturday a strong wind arose. The girls and I went body surfing. They thought I had become a kid again. It is exciting to crash across the breakers or ride them back to shore, or to see your daughters bobbing on the swells with delight. When a high wave breaks over your head, your voice echoes under the crest.

Last night the wind fell. Today the lake is serene. The water is clean and sweet again, filtered and cleansed by the action of the storm.

It's hot and oppressive. I get a glass of water from the filter in the fridge.

We drove home this afternoon. Back to the city with its dust and noisy streets.

Somebody rings the doorbell. I go down to lecture whoever it is, because it's always for the people upstairs; someone ringing the wrong bell.

On the sidewalk a few yards away stands a teenager with Down's Syndrome. His father, who is already lecturing him, turns and apologizes.

I miss tall trees over my head, soft grass under my feet, long evening shadows and a cooling breeze off the lake.

Love usually comes over me like a tidal wave. My infatuations are huge, fast, swelling and drowning. They are not superficial. If I really love a man I will never forget him.

Is this true? So many friends and lovers have come and gone from my life; gone forever. I fear betrayal. When I don't trust someone, I have learned to run away and forget as fast as I can.

Still, when desire comes, it washes me like a storm. I ride the surf, but usually find myself lying alone on the beach, my skin drying with salt and weeds.

Peg Kerr told me writing a novel is like dropping a stone into a deep well and waiting for the plink. You long for feedback, but it takes time.

True love is like that; or anything you put your heart into..

Raising children. You never know for sure how things will turn out. In that case, giving up is never an option..

It's easy to give up on love or discard a writing idea, but then nothing ever gets fulfilled. You end up lonely. I wonder how deep the well is. I wonder if there's any water at the bottom.