The water tastes tinny, even if you drink it out of a plastic cup. There are three shiny metal cups painted copper and maroon and orange juice, milk, water smells like minerals when you drink from them. Always, there is the sound of the lake, lapping the shoreline, crashing on the smooth rocks during a storm. The silence is overreaching and encompassing -- not so much silence as the absence of it, a quiet contained solely in the water, birds calling and beckoning, wind pulling through the trees in tight weaves, the hum of semis and trucks going everywhere and nowhere only a distant rumble in the glint of the bridge, boats speeding up and slowing down and causing ripples that ebb and flow away as quickly as they've come, cabin doors slamming shut and voices raising in love, irritation, laughter.
It smells like nothing else. There's a lake smell that sits on your skin long after you've showered, an underlying tone of campfire smoke and the green smells of trees and growing things. In the distance, the clouds hover quietly on the horizon, the other side of the lake obscured by a haze settling misty on the trees. You can heart cicadas and insects in the weeds as clearly as the loons willowy weeping cries. They echo across the water, undulating in sync with the unfolding of the waves. Late at night when the world is obscured by darkness, punctuated only by stars, you hear the loons singing across the lake. Then, the water is still and each sounds breaks, slices thick into the clarity of the night like the quick snip of scissors through hair.
Walking in the morning is the surest way of falling in love with the place, with the light, light everywhere, falling dappled on the camper, streams on the path, slipping through windows in leaves and trees, shining hot on the splintery wood of docks ringed with water. After a boat passes and leaves the echo of its motor strumming, the water becomes insistent, splashing on the rocks like a two year old in tears, only trying to say, "look at me?" How often do we look but forget to see? Dragonflies fly over the surface of the water, against glass, and they skim the tops creating small ripples that stretch until they are no more, mere memories.
If the day is cool enough and the water still, you can see to the bottom and the light slants, wavering and warbling a hopeful song on the rocks, the fish, the powdery soft sand on the bottom. It's clear and green and deep blue and strange, like resting on the edge of a city we've never seen. Everything is refracted with the touch of a rainbow and it's all hesitantly quiet, growing lake algage, making homes for silver schools of minnows house hunting and slipping under creaky docks by the thousand, the gentle uncurling of water not touching the life below.
It's still and hopeful on the dock. Lake life leaves me understanding everyday life better, has a way of quieting my soul like nothing else.
hesitantly writing. slowly sharing again. it feels a little awkward, but good, like biking for the first time each summer, the pedals turning in and around and the first shakiness of staying upright, the sun on your skin. hoping to settle back into this space, with the ease not unlike unpacking from a trip, steadily, reposefully, reflectively.
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