Finding distance in the outside world is harder than you think in the current pandemic. Isolation on a state park trail seems like a given, but with winter in full swing the reaches of some of the trails we’d hit in the Sierra Nevada are closed for the winter. This combined with a recent passing storm have also more limited options than usual in the lower foothills.

Not to be deterred on a crisp and bright Sunday morning, we set out on a back trail along the Stanislaus River where few people wander. Monica had walked this trail many times as a biologist and we know it well. The kids climb over boulders as the remnants of the last storm clouds flicker, making their way to a soft bank along the river. The kids skip rocks across the mirrored surface of the river, the ripples bouncing the morning sun in starry patterns into the desolate branches of the river’s canopy.

The stark early browns and cold yellow light of the winter day are shattered by a brightly colored hot pink note in the river. The note spins and bounces off the branches and underbrush of the soft bank, dancing off the exposed edges of smooth rocks jetting out of the river as if a ballet dancer on a stage. Like a dancer it comes to a graceful finish, stopped on a branch at my feet.

Picking up the note I realize it’s placement in the river is not by chance. Neither trash or a note at all, but rather the former remains of a tiny paper airplane with an ask: 27 wishes for my 27th birthday.

At once I am intrigued and terrified. What exactly is the edict on found wishes floating in a river? Does this make me one of the moirai, a player in the fates by my sheer interception of this floating transcription? In the end I decide I hold no spindle or sheers in this fateful enterprise of wishes and squint in the shining light at 27 wishes.

In a moment of careful reading of washed lines, a picture emerges of a person I’ve never met. Happiness and health takes the stage, the wish repeated half a dozen times in various forms, not just for their own but also their family. Family of course is it’s own actor, a conflict of siblings and family beliefs that hold back their dream, all of which they’d wish to reconcile. That conflict drives many other wishes; they want wrongs righted, independence. Said person will prove it; they wish to be a famous photographer, a famous director, just famous.

While I do not control the fates, I do have vague recollections of being 27. Not all wrongs will be righted, that you can’t control the outcome in many relationships. You can reconcile family conflict, but it requires forgiveness and understanding. Fame is never the means to an end and proving yourself to other people won’t make you happy.

In the end I sent the pink note of wishes back into the river to continue its journey. The final wish, one I can attest I had was simple: I want to be loved. Looking at my three kids and wife and this winter day I feel that love. At 27, it seemed an insurmountable task, that it was never going to be in the cards.

The fates had different plans. Wishes or not, they always do.