Nostalgia

Summer is the season for nostalgia. I've decided this, considering that the melancholy memories have been flowing in like white-capped waves over the last few weeks. It's strange, but winter seems to be the time for dreaming and diving into imaginative realms, whereas the warming weather sends me straight back into the unreality of my childhood; everyone's childhood is stranger than fiction. Proustian visions call for italics.

There are some nameless lakes left in the world. I grew up in, on, beside, around, and with a nameless lake--nameless because no one ever questioned to which body of water you referred when you said "the lake." My lake. Our lake. Green, pasture-rimmed well of the souls surrounding.

My first house was wooden, unfinished; Mom was squatted, hammering on it the day I was born. Unmatched carpet squares overlaid on strange, rough flooring. Small knotholes through which one could peep from one side of the stairwell, clear through a parallel knothole and into the closet under the stairs (sometime home of the spastic yorkie puppy). Skylight above the stairway, sunshine streaming against dark wooden planks--scent of varnish everywhere. Fresh. Bunk beds in the far corner bedroom--mine on top, rainbow brite sheets and a mickey mouse nightlight. Stomach virus, vomit in my brother's hair--him sleeping through the shower that rinsed it out. "I need to hear a story" "I had another nightmare."I need a drink of water."Snoring sounds like monsters."

Abundant blueberry bushes ten yards from the back porch shrouded in woods. Large orchard sloping down into flat pasture and garden. High Lombardi poplars leaning like feathery fingers out over the road beside the orchard, which is filled with plum trees, pear trees, crabapples (stomach cramps and flinging fights), peaches. Across the orchard from the dark wooden house is another house, this one stone, and again built foundation to sky by my father, grandfather, mother, grandmother, and half-uncle. Raw stone, mortared together--still a phenomenon to me. Still standing. Still in the family--the uncle. Deaf, cruelty waning with loneliness, longing for absolution. Abuser.

And it is around this stone house, raised before I was born, that the soil is blackest--the grass still thick and green, dandelions along the white, cream, and brown-speckled gravel driveway (long and winding, flattening into peagravel concrete and sloping down sharply just above the lower level of pasture and garden which separate wood from stone homes). Maternal grandmother Nell, Nanny, straw hat, dark hair, Indian owl eyes, thin white Tshirt, skinny brown legs, denim shorts, red-handled scissors, on her knees next to the driveway, snipping the grass and flowers even (mower so imprecise).

And now the lake. Always the lake. Forever this lake inside me. The lined leaning poplars protecting it from time, leafy blades slicing away the time that ventures too near. Still, green water--edged nervously by flipping brim, speaking in gulps through the breaking bass. Carrying the sound of four to six cows (first the blacks, as stupid and kind as cows can be; then the browns and whites, sweet but smarter, one pearl-white calf--afterbirth spilled like a gigantic Cadbury egg across sharp gray rocks, what a smell in the sunshine...sex and rot), carrying the Canada geese across a season and into the winter wheat to graze on the lake's far shore, carrying the green steel john boat, carrying the dead kitten, neck broken, nose bleeding, carrying the memories that teem and surge below the silent surface.

Fishing alone. Swimming together. Swimming with abandoned yellow tufts of gosling trailing circles behind me, climbing my shoulders for occasional rest. Fishing with father. Fishing with friends. Catfish on crayola-colored jugs, bobbing and captured, still owning the deep water, sharks. Slimy. Unclean.

Four long curves in the lake, one half in narrow, shallow shade below the oaks, hickorys, a single sycamore. Deep, it was deep, with cold pockets grasping your thighs and breath as you bobbed along the surface beside the fishing pier. Cold deep. Turtles with crocodile jaws, parrot beaks, log-snappers, monsters. Giants. Well-mannered cottonmouths lurk, slink, hide their darkness among the wet twigs floating.

This is enough for tonight. I feel the flow ebbing, though I don't think I could've stopped it till now. This is the water in my mind, always lapping.