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Friday, 11 May 2007

Gilbert Lake

By Joy Des Jardins of The Joy of Six

It’s the quiet that I love. The total absence of the day’s clamor of activity. It’s just me, the moon, and the crickets. Their language fascinates me. A symphony of rubbing batons - hundreds, thousands - they serenade me. I interpret what they say. Their conversation is loud and long - endless and impersonal. Still, it holds me in fascination.

I come to sit at the end of the pier; in the dark, in the glow of the lake where no one can see me but an occasional frog - and those crickets. A turtle pokes his head through the stillness of the water; he can see me if he chooses to look. He has made the only ripple the moonlight will let me see all the way to the other side.

I can make out a faint light from a cottage through the trees. I think someone else may be sitting on a pier listening to my cricket symphony. I’d never know. I haven’t known all the times I’ve come out here, but I think there could be. There are no voices, no ruffling of the reeds or grasses. But the end of a pier is a solitary place where one goes for serious silence, and they could be out there - just like me.

I’ve never known water to be so silent. I’ve known it in its rage, or in its flow, or in its trickle; but never in such silence as these nights. I can only assume the lake and all its creatured inhabitants are united as one to produce such a breathtaking masterpiece. And the trees. I’ll add the moonlit landscape of the trees to the union. For if the lake is to be the canvas, the trees must be the frame.

Farther down the lake to my right I hear a faint noise. I become motionless, as if they can hear me sitting. Someone in a rowboat. But they are much too far away to break the boundary of my silence, and the turning of the oars is all that gives them away. Still, I’m not alone out here.

I have no sense of time on these nights. It deceives me every visit I make. But I make the most of it while I can, while my absence goes unnoticed. Before that creaky screen door calls me to come and cracks the seal of my oneness. It just never feels long enough. I can think of nothing short of catastrophic proportions that would lure me away from nights like this where the trees talk, and the lake listens.

And so, I take it in. Every last drop before the day’s final end. It holds me there by its beauty, its serenity, its magic. It sends me off into the night to sleep, but more importantly, to dream. The lake, the moon, the night, and the crickets give me that gift. And tomorrow will be the same.

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