Truth Lake
How a childhood on the lake pours into a practice in presence.
I grew up next to a lake, not far from an even bigger very well known lake. A Great Lake, in fact. Lakes were everywhere, really, where I’m from. Also rivers. We’d go to see my Grandma Novosel or my Aunt Patty or Aunt Mary or another of my many aunts in Pittsburgh and there were three rivers there, and as an adult I find myself living just blocks from rivers in every city, but more on that later. This story is about lakes.
When I was a kid I could ride my bike to the lake. That’s how close we were. Down the street we lived on, and we were the first house so it wasn’t far, you’d hit route 18. It was busy and there were blind spots so I’d stop and put my feet down. Look and look and look some more. Sure that there were no cars coming, I’d hop off and walk my bike across and to the top of the hill that swooped down into Lauderdale Estates.
Riding down the hill was thrilling. The feet out, wind in my hair kind of thrilling. And at the bottom I’d turn left and curve around past the beach where you could walk into the lake if you didn’t mind walking across a stretch of discarded seaweed.
Then along the lakefront houses, those lucky folks, pedaling and coasting, pedaling and coasting, and past our docks along the canal. Our family had a couple of docks where some of my uncles kept boats. Usually there was a house boat, a speed boat, and a pontoon boat, at least. (I also had a lot of uncles.) There I could turn toward Grandma’s house the short way inland one block to Bay Drive or keep going past the docks where the road curved again and met Bay Drive on the other side.
Either way, there was Grandma’s house. Just a block from the docks on the canal of Conneaut Lake.
Summer meant we were in the water. We’d take the boats out to the sand bar and spend entire days there. Lunch meat and cheese in the cooler. Grab a bun and make a sandwich when you’re hungry. Bags of chips everywhere. The salt sticks to you when you’re wet with lake water but you just jump right back in and wash it off. We’d water ski early in the mornings. Or pack into one of the boats to go tubing for a break from being anchored.
On those long days at the sandbar, the boats would drift and one of the uncles would adjust it when it got too close to another. Every half hour or so someone out there would rev up an engine to adjust a boat. Mostly though we splashed and floated and snacked until we were sun-spent and exhausted. Then we’d go back to Grandma’s where she’d made dinner for the lot of us.
On the Fourth of July we’d take the boat out at night where shivering and huddled under blankets my cousins and I would “ooh” and “ahh” at the fireworks, shouting the names of our favorite ones. “Swirlies!” or “Shimmeries!” or “Christmas!” for the red and green ones. We’d putter back in sleepy and dusted firework ashes and feelings of magic.
This was life at the Lake.
During the school year it was a different story. The boats were pulled from the water and put away somewhere on land where they looked out of place. Snow came early and stayed late. There were long bus rides to town and uniforms at school and homework to do. I’d get outside any chance I could, before the snow in October at least. I’d lay under a tree and read book after book after book as fall leaves fell around me, or fill notebook after notebook of poetry and musings.
Summer was living and Fall was reflecting on the living and Winter was just kind of surviving, and then Spring was really just more Winter.
The lake water, in a way, was home. It was where I lived so much of my life. Where I did so much of my “doing.” Where I was most fully present in the moment, as opposed to all up in my head which I was almost any other time. I have a very rich inner world, which is typically wonderful a gift but occasionally not, and it was the water that kept me out of my head and within myself.
I left at seventeen and haven’t spent much time in any lake in the twenty-three years since then, but I do find myself drawn to be near water. As I grew into my twenties and thirties I found myself living again and again near to whatever river ran through whichever city I was in. I was eleven blocks from the Cumberland in East Nashville, then just a few blocks from the East River in Brooklyn, then twenty blocks from the Willamette River in Portland, OR, and then fourteen from the Cumberland again. If I’m choosing a weekend away from home, I’m choosing a cabin on a lake where I can sit and look at the sky reflecting on the water, the geese flying overhead, the trees acting like privacy curtains on such a corner of the earth, both precious and ordinary at the same time.
Last year was wretched for me. When my marriage fell apart following my husband’s affair and the illuminating of his core being, I reached for truth. What was the truth, within me, about my marriage? Could I swim in it like the lake and feel carefree, fully myself, embodied and present? The more I touched truth within myself the less that relationship held me, and the more that I touched that truth within myself afterward the less letting it go hurt.
What was the truth about who I am and the life I could live in line with that purest self? It’s sleeping well at night. It’s being intentional with how I raise my daughter. It’s opening the windows in the house, even if I have to put on a sweatshirt, because cool fresh air makes me feel alive and connected. It’s growing things. It’s eating a tomato just seconds after pulling it from the vine. It’s noticing myself, each day. It’s asking the questions instead of assuming I already know the answers. How do I feel today? What do I need today? Who am I, or am I not, today? Again and again and again.
Truth is the place where our outward lives express our inner selves. It’s as ages old and as ever changing as the water.
My relationship with truth is different now. It was hidden before, not inaccessible but tucked away. I let it intimidate me because it sometimes asks for boldness in a way that requires energy and courage. Now, that’s an open channel. The line between my mind - my thinking and acting and processing self - and my truth is like the canal between Grandma’s house and the lake. I can so easily hop in the boat and travel to the deepest part.
And there I can jump right in, and feel at home within the lake waters of myself.
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Oh! How beautifully written!