Walked to the lake in the dark for the first time in a while, sick of being cooped up. Forgot how it looks when there’s fog in the street lamps, a cone of milky light with bugs flapping about. Frogs and early morning traffic din, something rummaging in the bushes. The power lines draped pole to pole and the bistro lamps up the road at that freaky Chinese restaurant we’ll never visit, just looks ominous (“August Moon”). Walking with my back to the last street lamp how it throws my silhouette on the pavement and is strikingly realistic, the slant of my uncombed hair. The very last lamp before you get to the park is peach colored and makes the scene feel vaguely Halloween.

No one is at the park this early and this is the best time to listen for owls. The first lawn sprinklers lurch to life and the line of tall pines is smudged at the top with fog. Then the geese start and it’s not pretty; but they’re straightforward at least, you know what to expect from geese. The water fowl congregate by the dock and like me are probably happy for the season’s change, no more tourists. Some of the lakefront houses on the far side have exterior lights on which throw a cool reflection on the lake’s surface like candlelight, light amber. Behind those houses it’s just tall trees. In fact it’s a ring of tall trees with the lake in the middle. So the trees reflect in the water like a Rorschach. And it’s a game of see what you can see.

With the water lapping the edge and the soft owl hooting this can be the best meditation. Forget Tibetan singing bowls. Sit long enough and the little nearby critters start to emerge: little birds, then what looks like that same damn hawk from our back yard. The owl hooting is like some exploratory probe, the aural equivalent of a lighthouse beacon the way it pans through the dark from side to side. The sunrise reveals just clouds and a slate of gray, same color as the lake. That drabness can get to you over time if you don’t learn to look for variation, wherever you can find it. (“Rain changing to showers; showers changing to rain.”)

I walked to the lake because watering in the dark seemed weird and I needed something to do. And like our dog who gets her mental stimulation from sniffing new scents I get mine like that too. The dock is the color of driftwood, bleached gray like bone. The legacy wood posts in the water must denote a sanctioned swimming area or some older version of the dock long since removed. All the geese are preening themselves, fussing with some itch beneath their wings. Their necks extend like garden hoses. Then suddenly one will stand in the shallow water and make a show of flapping their wings, as if to dry them or signal “I’m out.”

Then I am too.

(Later)

It’s a beautiful gloomy fall day even though it’s not fall yet. When the season starts to slide downwards there’s no stopping it. It is the exact opposite as spring in fact, where it all opens up. We are closing down. It could be like a rummage sale, with that desperate feeling (“everything must go!”).

The neighbors are year-round Halloween enthusiasts which I admire but it can be grating come summer to see the same displays still up. It spoils it. But this year they’ve invested in some new features, and with the fallen tree on their front lawn from last November it all kind of works, the sense of collapse. A token witch, some decomposing zombies coming out of the ground, then some random pirates with flashy red shirts. Not coherent theme-wise, more like a costume party caught in medias res. The scale of the witch is disproportionately larger than the rest but that makes sense somehow. I like the purple and green flashing lights at night and can stand there in our bedroom looking down on it all glaring, like Anthony Perkins.

The rain is short-lived, hardly enough to evoke a smell but it does help with the air quality. Stayed in my bedroom most of the day as Charlotte and Rosie had friends over for a party and I felt self-conscious in my mask and pajamas. Asked Charlotte to bring me a plate of sandwiches and cake. Today will be a copy/paste of yesterday sans cake.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, prose

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, journal writing, pacific northwest, prose