April 20, 2001
Lake Moods
It's a gray, rainy Friday here, and I'm feeling cranky. It's one of those days where you'd rather be anywhere but at work. What, precisely, I feel like doing, I have no idea. Sleeping, maybe. Or curled up with a book watching the lake. I'm discovering a great fondness for the lake my parents' house is on. When it first opened up from the ice and thawed completely, I was quietly blissful for days afterwards. I love to watch the way it shifts through colors and textures depending on the weather. This morning it was elephant gray, the surface ringed and rippled with remembered rain. Yesterday afternoon, when I was coming home from school, it was bright blue under the sunny sky, with a buoyant surface. On sunny, windy days, not only is it bright blue, but the wind whips the water up into a froth and sends it crashing to the shore in whitecap after whitecap, as if it were having wistful dreams of the ocean. Yesterday morning it was contemplative and still and misty. I wanted nothing more than to sit there and watch the mist play with the ducks and the swans.
The lake has a personality of its own. Or rather, it is a personality of its own. It quietly exerts its influence over every part of the lives of those who live near it. It's a small lake, really, but the weather is definitely affected by its presence, with sharper winds and cooler temperatures in both winter and summer. There is a greater tendency of things to warp and mold because of the damper air. There are more bugs -- like the spiders I had run-ins with last week. There is a special calm in the mornings and evenings, as if the mist that rises from the lake were somehow a soporific. On warm summer days, it sends out a raucous call to everyone nearby with a boat or a Jet-Ski -- there's not much stillness then. Snowy winter evenings are the same, only the buzzing of Jet-Skis is replaced with the whine of snowmobiles.
Aside from my brief stay with my folks when Gary and I separated, I've never lived this close to a lake before. I didn't quite understand what the appeal was, if you weren't an active boater or fisherman. Sure, I thought, it's pretty, but so what? The frustrating thing is that I understand it now, but I can't explain it. What is it about a body of water that stirs us this way? Does it appeal to something primitive within us, some ancient stirring that wants only to make certain we have a secure water supply? Is that what makes living by water so appealing? Is it a simple longing for beauty?
The final answer doesn't really matter, if there even is a final answer. What matters is that I'm fortunate enough to live somewhere that continually inspires wonder in my soul.
