It’s still dark here. The crated Pete is crying because Binks, who was locked out of the bedroom all night long, is in my lap, getting his attention cat-like, with long body twists that resolve themselves in a wet nose rubbed against my inner arm.
He makes typing difficult, but I won’t move him.
I want to tell you about my life now, and how it changed in a rush of days in June, split itself into particles and then floated, disconnected like silt in a jar of creek water for a while. I do not want to tell you, particularly, about the splitting or the floating, but rather about how things have settled and become — or seem in the process of becoming — something new.
I have a new job and am doing the new job things, like figuring out how lunch is eaten and who likes whom and who doesn’t seem to like anyone at all. I am trying to make myself useful without quite knowing yet what useful will be and smiling a lot, as is necessary.
It’s strangely satisfying. The last time I had to do this (many jobs in several states in rapid succession) I was twenty-something, unestablished and ill-prepared, and driven by the specter of student loans. In my forties, it’s like that fantasy of going back to high school without any of those adolescent insecurities; seeing things as they are.
But the job is not the most important thing, nor is it all that interesting for strangers or half-strangers on the internet to tell you about their jobs. I promise not to give you 7 Tips for Surviving a New Workplace. There is no advertising embedded in the next paragraph.
In the next paragraph, I want to tell you how it is that I have come to live a few yards away from a beach on Lake Erie, and what it is like to live here, and how deeply, at about-to-turn-forty-four, I have been surprised.
The house is little and in a state of being repaired. It’s a century old, built as a tiny summer cottage and then built onto and onto and then left to decay. Don has restored it room by room, until the only room left is the front porch, which is he is turning into a windowed alcove where we can sit, summer and winter, and watch the people go by, or the seasons, or just the quiet changing of the light.
Often, after work, I find him covered in sawdust from some or other electrical saw, or sitting in a crawlspace with a floor jack or asking me to come and imagine what it will be like when the light switch is set here, just so.
Often after work, I walk down our narrow street to where it dead-ends at the lake and make my way along the low wall built to keep the floodwaters out. As I go, I watch the water and am struck by it in ways that I will find the words to explain to you, if you will give me a moment.
If you will turn with me down a side street and notice, for the first time, how the window in the house on the left slants a little, or that building over there, white and low, and wonder with me what it used to be before it became whatever it is now.
If you will come with me to the place at the end of the road where a channel is cut, and watch the water draining out into streams that wind away through grassy fields and treed ones.
If you will stand with me on the edge of the wall overlooking that channel and also on the edge of something else — of something so achingly new that will also become — or is already in the process of becoming — something old and familiar like a pair of wool socks you forgot about, that you dig out of a drawer some afternoon in autumn before you go to sit on a front porch with windows on all sides to watch the light change as the sun goes down.
Come with me now to the beach where we went last night, both of us sticky and hot, me from time on an exercise machine, he from whatever he was doing with that saw that roared in my ear for a while. Walk into the water. Feel the warm air and the cold water reverse themselves when, finally, you grit your teeth and go under.
Float on your back and remember, suddenly, like a dream returning, how you were twenty-two, once, sitting around a campfire with people you don’t know any more, each of you speaking careless dreams into the flying sparks.
Some day, you said, not sure if you really meant it, but thinking you did, Some day, I want to live up in Michigan and have a house by the water.
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