Swim in the Lake

If somebody was outside now and looking up at the second floor of the house, he’d see me staring out from behind the thick lattice and wet glass of one of my bedroom windows, and I’d probably look cold. I’m always cold.  My room’s always freezing. It never warms up. The heater’s the problem.  I’ve got a cold heater. It can’t be fixed. I can’t do anything about it, so I just live with it.

My bedroom windows are good for looking outside. They’re in the middle of the west face of the house, and they stare out like eyes on the park that’s next door. It’s not much of a park. It’s just got some grass and trees and a beat-up bench at one end, and it’s only about the size of half a football field. On the left is Walnut. On the right is the drop-off that goes down to Lake Erie. From my windows you can see the lake pretty well if you want to look at it or even if you don’t.

The park’s disappearing. The lake’s washed away the beach that was down below the park, and erosion’s been eating into the bank for a long time. So now the park’s a lot smaller than it was sixty years ago when I was a kid. Once in awhile that’ll hit me and really get to me until I think about something else.

Sometimes Mr. Maki will walk on the sidewalk by Walnut and look up and see me at a window and wave. If I notice him I’ll wave back. I’m Mr. Maki on the sidewalk I see me wave back and I’m thinking He’s weird He’s always at the window He’s the only one in that house. I’ll treat other neighbors the same way. I mean, if another neighbor walks by and waves, I’ll wave back. I sort of feel like I have to. Sometimes people I don’t recognize walk by. They may look at me, but they never wave, of course, so I don’t wave to them.  Who cares about them anyway?

If I wanted to, I could watch the cars going by on Walnut and the houses and people on the other side of it, but most of the time I don’t want to. I just look at the park. Or the lake.

It’s February, so I feel even colder than usual. It’s close to freezing and an icy drizzle’s coming down. The cold rainwater’s dripping from the leaky roof gutter and down the window, and the water drops are sort of slushy, like they’re about to freeze. The rain’s coming down on the snow that’s left over from the storm we had last week. In the park small piles of dirty snow are scattered all over. Against the wet grass and mud they sort of look like welts.

I think the rain’s about to change to snow. I bet it’s going to be bad. The clouds are really dark over the lake, and the wind’s picking up, so you know it’s coming. The lake’s dark too and has big whitecaps. Right now you know the waves are hitting the bank below the park again and again and eating into it more and more. A little more of the park will be gone by the end of the winter. You feel like you want to go somewhere or do something, but then you sort of feel like you’d better not try because there’s really nothing you can do about it and nowhere to go. So you just stay where you are and look out the window. 

When I was a kid and the park was bigger, I used to watch Mrs. Lusko from my windows. She’d be wearing her white swimming cap and blue bathing suit with green flowers on it, and she’d walk from her house on Walnut through the park to the steep path that went down to the beach. She’s dead now, but back then she was a retired teacher in her seventies. She’d go swimming every morning around seven whenever the lake water wasn’t too cold, and sometimes even when the lake was rough. (I’d never go in the lake when it was really rough. Or even a little rough.) The water was really polluted in those days. The lake’s not that clean now, but it was really lousy when Mrs. Lusko swam in it. There used to be a lot of dead fish on the beach back then, so that gives you an idea of the kind of water she swam in.

She had bad arthritis in one leg, so she’d walk with a limp across the park and go down the path to the beach and wade into the lake and swim for about an hour. When she was finished, she’d limp back up the path to the park, limp across the park, and then limp across Walnut to her house. She lived with her middle-aged son, who was a real nut, and with her husband (until he died from whatever it was that made him like a vegetable), and with three dogs. The whole thing didn’t make a lot of sense to me. I mean, she had enough on her plate. She was an old lady caring for a crappy leg and a crappy son and a crappy husband and three crappy dogs, but she’d always go down to the lake and swim and come back, and then do the same thing the next day, and the day after that, and so on, until she couldn’t do it anymore. Then she finally died and they took her son somewhere. At Mother of Sorrows, where she used to teach first graders at the church school, they had a huge funeral for her. Even the mayor went to it. But I didn’t see the point. I still don’t.

Photo by ethan on Unsplash.