A House On The Water

There is a house on the water that beckons me from time to time, bids me to come watch the waves that are hardly waves, that lick lightly against the docks and seawalls and tree trunks along the shore. It is a house where I have laughed until I cried, cried until the tears lulled me to sleep.  A house where I have been loved and tended and nursed back to, if not health, then at least a level of wellness that allowed me to move on.

The first time I saw it, it was just a lot studded with hickory trees and carpeted with pine needles.  The lake was on the other side of a couple hundred feet of brush, barely visible from the road.  My friends were considering buying it and building a weekend house.  They wanted to know what I thought.  I knew it didn’t matter what I said; they had already made up their minds.

A short while later they did buy the lot and they built a house and on the day they moved in – the day after a deluge that left the as-yet-unsodded yard a slick palate of red clay – I, along with the rest of them, carried bulky furniture and boxes of kitchenware and armloads of linens up still-wet steps to begin the process of making it a home.  My housewarming gift was a terra cotta angel that they hung on the screened porch that overlooked the lake, a porch where over the years we would sit and stare at the stars reflecting off the water until late into the night, talking softly of important things.

A few years later, long enough for the house to have birthed significant memories, it burned.  There was nothing left but the skeletal remains of appliances and the terra cotta angel.  Having fallen two stories as the wood around her charred and crumbled, she survived but for a tiny chip off the corner of her robe – a small scar, a huge reminder of resilience and survival.

So much was lost in the fire.  Photos and family heirlooms, the last of the vegetables that Grandma canned.  And, yet, my friends decided to rebuild and not just rebuild, but make the lake house their home.  It took a while, but the new house created its own memories.  It is that house to which I have come at the end of this long hard summer.

We are sitting on the porch watching the unpredictable clouds that one moment are flitting across the sky and the next emptying themselves of thick rain and the next producing a fine mist that blows in our faces.

“Look!  There he is!  The fisherman!”  

I turn my head, looking for a man in a raincoat and slouchy hat, wondering what kind of idiot would be out on the water in this weather.  What I see instead is a white heron, long and elegantly lean, looking exactly, I think, like Benedict Cumberbatch if Benedict Cumberbatch was a white heron.

“He comes every day,” my friend explains.  “Sits on that cypress stump and catches fish.”   And at just that moment, the heron lowers his skinny neck and plucks a fish from the water.  

“It’s amazing,” my other friend says, “that he is fast enough to do that.”  I nod in agreement. It is, in fact, amazing.

What is more remarkable to me, though, is that the cypress stump upon which the heron makes his stand is underwater.  It looks as though he is standing on the surface of the lake, the possessor of some strange buoyancy.  It reminds me of St. Peter.

Later, lying in a bed that feels almost like home, unable to sleep, but not necessarily unhappy about it, I think of the heron.  I wonder what is my strange buoyancy, what it is that keeps me from sinking.  It varies, of course.  Sometimes it is a book; sometimes it is a long slow walk down my dirt road.  And occasionally it is a house on the water that beckons me from time to time.

Copyright 2024