The lake at dusk is a black mirror with the day’s last light trapped in it.  You can chase the silver glints in a canoe, but they shatter easily, even when you just ease the paddle in every now and then to correct for the wind.  At night with the little green-white light I mount in the bow, it’s like chasing a firefly or having Tinker Bell guide you to the first star to the right.  Every now and then I’ll work at it for half a mile or so to get into another matrix of waves and currents, but it’s a shallow lake and the water meanders and I like to meander with it along the shoreline where the bottom changes a lot.  Hope your meanderings are as fluid and rewarding.  Sometimes you just need to go with the current, and sometimes you need to work at escaping it.  Depends on how far you want to travel and where you want to go.  I’m also hiking a lot at Elm Creek these days, but there are so many memories along the trails and in the fields that it’s like walking the stations of the Cross for me.  Sacred moments all.  Magic follows me everywhere, and the beauty and peace are overwhelming.

Closer to home, I’m busy proving my insanity.  Neighbors are taking notes.  I mow the lawn at a run with lightning flickering overhead, but what really gets them is when I mow the driveway.  Takes me three or four passes to blow the clippings off the asphalt, but from a distance none of that can be evident.  Expecting to win an award for best-mowed drive on the block any day now.  Caught my hand in an old refrigerator fan, but it was so dusty, rusty and slow that it didn’t do much damage.  And we had a wonderful storm the other night.  Laid on my bed with the blinds up and watched it flicker green, blue and silver until it raged itself out.  What do you see when you look out your back door?  Storms?  Flowers?  Wind on water?  Living on a lake is grand, and this one rubs up against the second largest municipal park in the nation (5,400 acres), making me feel like I have one foot in the greater universe. Handy for walking among the stars or shuffling through galaxies. 

Just knew that as soon as I challenged the concept of cues from fate, as I did in last month’s column, I’d see nothing but signs and symbols.  My closest companion confirms it with her own anecdotes about white feathers and a message that came with some flowers she bought.  Oddly enough, I found a white feather stuck on the edge of the grass just outside my door the next morning (the second in a couple of weeks).  So twice, just for fun, I double-dared the gods of irony – once to make a deer appear at a certain improbable spot in Elm Creek, and the other time demanding a straightforward verbal sign regarding a certain compatibility.  Do I have to tell you?  Bambi’s sister showed like she’d been summoned from another dimension, and when I looked up for the verbal cue there was a little black bottle of cologne with white print: Classic Match. Hmmm.  Nah.  Then again…

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