(From Journal: County Line Lake, Watersmeet, Michigan)
August 13, 2005
Here I’m, once again, in the stale trailer—a musty moth smell that will never retire like the old owners. The night is cold; socks are welcoming to bare feet. I lay here underneath my favorite quilt, a wedding present my parents received. Twenty four years of marriage lay under the very same cotton squares: fights, secrets, and love.
The next morning, lying on the pier, the lake appears identical to the picture taken last year, yet the sky is bluer like God turned up the cool tones. A dragonfly suns itself upon my bare belly as I try and get some sun. Two fishermen cast to the shore from their small boat, slowly and silently trolling through the water as if they don’t want to wake anything below—a creature that is not local to the lake.
On the shore, my family’s paddle boat resides on its belly, waiting for someone to turn it upright—give it some use besides a home for spiders. Stringy clear threads are wrapped around the rudder again and again like spool. A dried-out lily pad on the bottom, sucked of its green by the sun, is brown but not dead. Nothing is ever really dead, just forgotten about.
This world is far from “the” world.
my place up north takes me out of this world into a more stable one. the constant, unchanging sameness is a welcome respite.
ReplyDeleteBob, You sure you are not a fiction writer? "the constant, unchanging sameness is a welcome respite" . . . nice!
ReplyDeleteI have enjoyed reading your post, I felt like I was right there looking through your eyes as I had read it. I am so familiar of what you are saying. My father, who is now deceased once lived on the Zumbrota River in Rochester, Wisc, and my sister and I had to go to his house on the weekends and that is where we had found our serenity is along his bank on the river, and seeing him take the boat out of the water,after the use of fishing and him just showing us the beautiful homes along the river and etc. So when fall had arrived during that weekend stay, we had seen how all the boats had taken there rest upon the banks of the shore.The calmness of the water, that looked like ice, and accacionally a flop here and there from some fish getting its meal for the night.No smells from the campfire's at night and no eco's that flowed from upabove the river. Betty
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