Spring shed: Place Post No. 8

Wind is blowing in from the Southwest when I get to the lake. Not a cold wind, but strong, the force pours into my ear as I clear paint chips from a picnic table and view my surroundings.
Ducks on the water are invisible except for the slender, black tubes of neck and curves of head. I can hear them, however, fart-like noises and squeaks reach across the water's edge. A robin, clinging to the branch above me, yells at the wind and flaps its wings, remaining if not steady, attached to its wooden landing. even though the winter wheat is a green, shimmer carpet beyond the boundaries of the area, the bird's rusty orange breast is the only brightness I see in this drab surrounding, and I am thankful for it.

There is no sun today, so even though the day is in the low 60s and imaginatively warm, I want tome color to my surroundings. Yes, thin stabs of grass poke up through the dead leaves and grasses around me, and the wheat fields to the north and south beckon with luxurious industry, but what I am feeling is a lack of color—in mind and physical presence. I feel shadowed and dark, as if the melanin under my skin reflected only "bruise" as a color.

The ducks take off, and I watch the water "settle" after them. Its ripples flow and bounce like static on a television: jittery lines that move up and down, and up and down again, then across the gray surface in a haphazard pattern. I am mesmerized by the movement, much as I am when settled (reluctantly) in front of a noise box that must be plugged in. Television transports the viewer to other places; here at the lake, I too disappear, but only to the landscape within. My semester is almost over, and I feel that I've come to see the wildness of the lake in a way I never had before. The flora and fauna were just sticks and grasses and animals..and they still are, but I feel like I'm seeing them with an awareness that others who sit at these picnic tables might not notice. I don't really feel that way about those human others—I don't feel any more connected to the people I went to school with or sit with at the bar when I rarely go to town. I don't feel any more interested in the history of my home county than I did before. I feel settled here only in the temporary way I felt settled here when it was "home:" as if it were a place to be, for a moment. Like a sun-dappled bit of grass that invites an afternoon of reading in the summer.
I have just returned from Denver, from the annual AWP conference and bookfair, and even though I went to sessions on the Nebraska writer, or the importance of place and home and habitat, instead of the rosy color of promise, my heart is shadowed like the water before me. The conference connected me to authors and ideas, and hearing the words of authors I've read all semester float above a crowd in person was wonderful. The words of Leslie Mormon Silko, and David Gessner—words in favor of ancient rootedness or of seeking it until one is connected to a new place, respectively—stick with me, but the words of Debra Marquart have probably done more for me, because she took the stagnation of small town life and wrote about it, honestly, Compassionately. But as part of her past.

The air swills around me, traces whorls in my hair and marks my skin with invisible patterns, as I walk to the edge of the water and settle on a smooth, white stump. I run my hand along the arch of thick branches, marvel at the smoothness where the tree has shed its bark. Parts of this felled giant feel like the soft, curved back of a lover, the sturdiness of shoulder blade and bone and muscle, wrapped up and protected by a porous, peach cover that sometimes shivers with resistance. The smoothness of the tree is a second skin, and I think about the many times I've talked of "skin" when referring to the frozen water. That cover is gone now, the one before me is active, fluid. Moving water.
Moving.

As I stand up to leave, I look behind me an notice a dead fish, (a huge bass? wallye?), eye sunken in and horrid, a muddy scab of brown. Two ants crawl from its gill and march across their scaly, silver territory; I squat and look at its distended belly, the yellow opening of its mouth. Dad would have loved to catch a fish this big (maybe four pounds) at Walgren, so I wonder what happened to him, how he washed up to the shore, and if he drowned in the heavy absence of vital water. He's brittle and dry, so there's no stench of rotting fish—I probably would have smelled him before now, if there had been—and for this, too, I am thankful. The air today smells light and beautiful, like spring rains and cottonwood down. It's sweet, and sticks to me, but is not sweet and sticky like some smoke, clogging the air with a resinous, wet blanket. No, it's sweet and sticky in the way pine gum is when it covers pores on your hand and lingers in the air with a movement of fingers.

I walk back to my car, across foot-deep ruts of peeling mud that puncture the road's surface, and again, I think of the skins we are shedding, always, everyone of us. After this coursework, all of it, I will never come back to the lake and look at it the same way, nor will I be able to write of the natural world without a need for deeper connection and understanding. We might spend seven years shedding our skins—a time that seems like forever—or see new elements of the world with the dawning of new seasons, but in every moment, sun-dappled or crusted with snow and ice, our own landscapes are transforming.