(The Return of)

Lake Michigan Diary 101

I took a few months off while finishing a couple of projects, but I have missed thinking about the big sweetwater lakes as they pass through time, so I’m resuming my Lake Michigan Diary.

Lately, it’s all the trees that love the lake, cast down deep roots to hold earth in place, boundary, their leaves spectacular against the blue of sky and turquoise of the lake. The ginkgo, so forgiving to our urban streets, graces us with a yellow leaf so yellow it vibrates. The dappled orange and red oaks leaves and the acorns and hollowed-out knots for squirrel business and the orange beech and the pinky-red-purple of maples silver, boxelder, Japanese, sugar. Catalpas are still green, but the seed pods hang low and brown.

I got to see another seasonal change as natural as the trees, just yesterday. Each year, somebody goes out to collect up the buoys that demarcate the place where power boats are not allowed to go because it’s a place for swimmers and kayakers. Usually, I wake up one morning, or return from work in the evening, and they’re gone, just like that. But there I was, on a Saturday morning, and what I thought I saw was one of the crane and dredge barges that have been laboring for more than two summers up in Evanston, creating an up-to-date water filtration system. I figured the barge was going into some dock for the winter, but I was wrong! It was the tug or tow that takes in those buoys! It was a simple, quick moment, but it felt like I had come down to the living room on Christmas Eve and caught Santa eating the cookies I set out.

A day later, I see a sailboat, as white as the buoy but moving quickly across the horizon, heading north to Kenosha to be placed in dry-dock. A gust of wind shakes loose a million little yellow locust leaves, like confetti, and I see that the stupid mylar balloon that got caught in the locust’s upper branches three years ago is still their, tattered old tinsel. I surprised myself by feeling glad it was still there, though I’ve wished it would deteriorate to nothing since I first saw it. There is a term for those things in life, like potholes, stupid rhetoric of bad politicians, elms dying of fungus, children having a noisy meltdown in the grocery store’s candy aisle, and annoying coworkers, “a spiritual hot spot”, something you don’t love but learn how to meet as a part of life, however imperfect. Oh little grocery store meltdown boy, you are ever, ever, evergreen.

And you, stupid tattered mylar balloon: I see you again, let me take a picture of you.