I don't know how we are changed. And I am not prepared, sitting by the great V of windows on our last morning at the lake house, to take any real look at that. But there is one kind of change I'd like to speak to. It suggests that we are immutable. That there is only acceptance, self-understanding, and the order of ourselves. Sideways, we are a block, but turned 45 degrees the world flows through us. It is essential change, yes, but, isolated, we are unaltered.
Of course, we are not isolated.
I only have a short time before we must pack up and leave the lake house for the year. And my attention is partly pulled by the last views of Lake Superior, with beautiful sweeps of wind made visible as they move along the surface of the lake.
So I'll just say this:
When I am home sometimes, late at night, I stay up too late fussing with my computer. In the basement, glowing lightly, I do one more read through, one more edit, one more search, one more bit of entertainment, one more... click.
At the lake house, however, I go to bed early. Altered perhaps by peace, I go to sleep a little after it is fully dark, and I awaken, well, a while after the light, when the flies tell me to. But after six nights of going to bed early, one night a long, slow thunderstorm rolled around in the north woods behind us, moved past our house, and eased onto the lake. Sitting in the full dark my wife and I watched it until she went to bed and I was alone. It was late. The storms had spread far out across the dark horizon. Every few minutes there was a brilliant flash of light. Depending on the source sometimes it was diffuse, sometimes it was thrillingly blinding, seeming, in my pop culture infused brain, to reveal all the skeletons of the world. Do pine trees have skeletons? It appeared that way to me. And sometimes, when the lightning struck, I could see it ribboning across the sky and down into the lake. This would be followed by slow thunder, deep and rising and oddly gentle.
I knew I needed to go to bed, but I couldn't tear myself away from my perch at the edge of the windows, gazing out eagerly into the deep night of the lakestorm.
"One more dazzling flash and I'll go to bed."
And then, wham and crash.
And then,
"One more dazzling flash and I'll go to bed."
On into the night.
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