lake

click photos to enlarge.

for a while when i was very little my grandparents ran a sort of motel or maybe a handful of cabins on beaver lake in northwest arkansas just out a bit from rogers. i can tell you now there's not much i thought i remembered about that time other than smells. the smell always of pine-sol from my grandma's cleaning and the similar, but oilier smell of the paints she used to capture and keep what she saw when she looked out onto the lake. the smell of my grandpa's cigars. the smell of lake water itself, which is not easy to describe but which is immediately recognizable to anyone who knows a lake anywhere, full of fish and a good breeze and coolness. not much else a child that small could gather up except a few rocks and shells.

but then the sweetie and i drag the boat into the water here in our own new york mountains i look around and feel like i am snagged on something, that crazy proust and his cookies again, something from so far back in myself it is barely there. the water is low this time of year, the city needing so much more in this heat. the drop of eight or nine feet has unearthed a part of the world that usually lives without air and keeps to itself. bare rock and sand that will soon enough slip back into the water. but for this day the sweetie and i row around inside the water of my grandma's paintings, rocks and trees overhanging, right up inside the earliest part of my thinking about what a person needs. rocks and water and trees and sky. not survival needs or comfort needs. higher up than that, less necessary and maybe because of that somehow more vivid. it is funny to think that needs, desires, can be passed down through generations like eye color or curly hair or dimples. but there they are, reminders of who we are and where we come from.