The Loss of Lakes and Words

+ a Grace Paley poem, a writing prompt, and a new workshop

When I was young, my family had a small summer lakehouse at the end of a long narrow yard. The house was 760 square feet. My three sisters and I shared a room with two bunk beds, and a wicker table shaped like a turtle. (According to the internet, tables like it are now “vintage” and worth a ridiculous amount.)¹

Was ours not a turtle? Was it actually a dinosaur? What are those things on its head? I'm the one halfway under the bunk bed.

The tiny house itself was vintage when my parents bought it and never got updated in the forty-plus years they owned it. They finally sold it to their long-term renter with the 60s-era linoleum floor intact, and the long wooden deck a little less so.

In our childhood summers, we swam, learned to water ski, and ate vast pots of boiled peanuts there. After lunch when we had to wait an hour to go back in, we made drip castles in the soft silty sand, decorated with seaweed untangled from our feet that morning. The rule was we couldn’t swim out past the weeds—the rustly patch of greens that acted like a fence.

In the first years, the weeds were a long way out leaving copious room for floating, flips, and handstands, then tossing our wet locks into fancy hairstyles. Later, the lake started drying up. Neighbors said this would happen—not to worry. Historically the lake would rise for seven years, then recede, and the cycle would continue. The lake would come back up.

Except it didn’t. The lakeshore crept out to the weeds. The exposed ground grew spiky grass that would cut your feet if you forgot your flip-flops. Scientists said it was a combination of years of below-average rainfall, the limestone ground leaking water into the aquifer, and excess groundwater pumping. Bad luck and bad management.

I thought about the lake when I read the poem below by Grace Paley. She captures not just the loss of a beloved landscape, but the loss of words that we all know.

When grief from the news—ours or others’—keeps coming, like somebody somewhere is draining our lake without our permission, we can feel wordless. What was once an easy swim is now a trudge on parched ground. What is left to say?

Paley gives us one answer.

Words

What has happened?
language eludes me
the nice specifying
words of my life fail
when I call

Ah says a friend
dried up no doubt
on the desiccated
twigs in the swamp
of the skull like
a lake where the
water level has been
shifted by highways
a couple of miles off

Another friend says
No no my dear perhaps
you are only meant to
speak more plainly

—by Grace Paley

a writing prompt

Write about a place in your memory that no longer is.

Or, take something from Paley’s poem or my words above, and go wherever you need to go on the page.

Speak plainly.

New Workshop: Writing for the Soul

Join me for an upcoming workshop where we will speak plainly on the page together. Writing for the Soul will meet for four Monday evenings in May on Zoom.

May 8, 15, 22, 29 | 7-8:30 pm eastern

Join a small group for a 4-week workshop using writing as a healing practice. We’ll start with poetry, images, objects, and more as prompts to get our writing going. We'll pay attention to our words, explore our memories and imagination, and give ourselves permission to experiment on the page. We'll listen generously to one another's words when we choose to share. No writing experience is necessary, and all are welcome. 

In my Writing in Company workshops, we believe that everyone is a writer with a strong and personal voice, and valuable words to discover. We write to find our voice and share it. Any feedback given in the workshop is supportive. 

Let’s write together.

You can read more about this—and all my workshops—and register here.

I know there is a method behind not displaying the cost of something up front, and making people click to find it out. That just annoys me. The regular cost for the workshop is $100. Paid subscribers have a 25% discount, and the code to register was sent in an email over the weekend. If you are a paid subscriber (thank you!) and you need it sent again, please let me know.

Want to join this and future workshops at a discounted rate, and enjoy a monthly online writing hour with others, plus support my work? You can upgrade to a paid subscription.

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1. It’s now worth between $995 and $3200. Never mind the lake, where oh where did the turtle table go?