It was one of those summers you will always remember, yet you will never be able to recall the year. Constantly haunted by my failure to write a simple date on the back, and being too cheap to buy a camera that does it for you. I was on a boat, in fact a typical Canadian boat called a canoe, it was mine and it leaked, mind you all birch canoes usually do.

I knew I loved the people in boat, may it be friends or family. I never took my family to my cottage, they never wanted to come. I think the stories of drunken escapades midnight swims was too tempting for them. Perhaps it would waken them from their sleep for senior life. I knew that at some point my friend Will would be there, he must have been, he was the ride. He drove one of those monstrous trucks that could carry a small continent and their belongings. Always one for a trip to the woods was our fisherman Neil, he as well must have been there. I remember I was in a canoe, I remember Neil and Will were there and I remember what camera I used.

I remember I was constantly reminding my friends not to f**k around in the canoe cause the camera was old and worth a lot of money. That any water would ruin it. I knew they understood my concerns but I kept saying it, I think marijuana does that to people. So here I was, in the middle of a Canadian summer during of my youth in my canoe on my lake with my closest friends and I saw this tree. A silhouette of a tree on the horizon. It had other trees beside it, but each one its own type and look. I thought it was calling me to take its picture, that the tree wanted to be remembered as being part of our memories. I took the picture and got the film developed. All three of us have had that image on our wall and in our offices since. Without us ever discussing it, we knew that image was the summary of the simple life we enjoyed only a few years earlier, yet never knowing the date.

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