Small Adventures

With the calendar turning to October, summer 2024 has officially closed out. It’s time to reflect and celebrate the “ta das” of summer (the flip side of the “to dos”).

person writing a to do list

In a mid-May post I outlined my six Great Lakes summer intentions – specific things I wanted to do by the end of the season. I shared that this is part of a strategy called design your summer that I’ve implemented for quite a few years after hearing about it on the podcast Happier with Gretchen Rubin. Each year I have found that setting, and then often completing, my summer intentions makes the season more vivid and memorable. 

As of this post, I have completed five of my six intentions. The one that I did not get to – a trip out to one of my favorite lakefront parks, Lake Erie Bluffs – is on the calendar for this coming weekend, paired with taking the girls out for breakfast and buying pumpkins and mums, which abound in the counties east of us. 

Additional Great Lakes moments happened unexpectedly or spontaneously over the summer. See my post from August that shares a couple – the playful Great Lakes water table at the Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the gem that is Edgewater Beach in Cleveland on a sunny Friday.

Our family outing to see the sunset from the Solstice Steps in Lakewood Park will remain an exceptionally rich memory. Since moving to Cleveland in 2014, we have always loved this park. It has an enormous playground that both of the girls have always looked forward to visiting. On our very first visit to the park, likely in 2015, we wandered down to the waterfront and found the lookout at the furthest east point of the promenade along the water. It looks directly east at the downtown Cleveland skyline. My husband, who grew up on the east side of the city, said that it was a completely new view of the city to him. It’s amazing how we end up living somewhere and, for no fault of our own, often end up with informally drawn boundaries, angles, and perspectives from which we see and experience it.

We went on a beautiful night, although the sky was very clear and so the sunset was attractive, but not unique. Catching a good sunset is tricky. It’s some clouds in the sky that create the sweeping, radiant, glowing sunsets where light ricochets around the sky. For optimal sunsets, you are looking for mid-level and high clouds with 50% cloud coverage.

As we sat on the huge stone steps nestled into the hillside, we were surrounded by the sounds of people making summer linger – music, laughter, children playing during dusk. People were seated all around like an amphitheater, watching this minor miracle of each and every day. When the sun dropped below the horizon line, everyone applauded.

The curtain has dropped on the season, but we had a really great summer. It felt long and leisurely. Fall has been a pretty significant gear shift. Even when trying intentionally to not be overbooked, it often just happens. I miss the slower pace and am trying two strategies to keep some of that slower pace at other points of the year. One is blocking time on the calendar for rest. For example, there is a Sunday afternoon in October where I have blocked 2-6 as an afternoon of rest; I will not book other plans at that time. 

The other strategy is small adventure-big adventure, which is a permutation on content by the writer and podcaster Laura Vanderkam. I try to have one small adventure every week; this might be solo or it might be with the family. The scope of an adventure can be very modest – a walk at a park, a local event, coffee with a friend. I also try to have at least one big adventure each month.  The scope of this can also be fairly modest – one of our family favorites is to pair either a park walk and exploration with a meal out or in colder months perhaps a museum with a meal.  For the meals, we often look for a hidden gem that is new to the family. 

So, here’s to fall adventures! If you’d like to see a re-cap from my summer, check-out my Instagram reel posted this week.

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Summer is starting to transition here in northeast Ohio. The day of this post, August 21st, my girls go back to school, soccer practices have started, and the fall calendar is starting to fill up. Seasonally, there is still more of summer to come. I still have three summer intentions to tackle by the end of September! However, it already seems like a chance to share some moments and discoveries from my smaller adventures this summer. 

The Great Lakes Water Table in the Children’s Garden at the Meijer Gardens, Grand Rapids, MI. In late June my older daughter and I stopped in Grand Rapids for a night on our way up to her sleepaway camp in Northern Michigan. We spent an afternoon at the Fredrick Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park. This is a world class place – large scale sculpture, indoor gardens, outdoor gardens including one of the most extensive Japanese gardens I’ve visited. We also found an incredible way to splash around in all five lakes at one time! In the children’s garden there was an expansive water table for splash and play in the shape of the full Great Lakes system. 

Beach Clean-up at Huntington Beach, Bay Village, OH. In early August I registered to do an early morning beach clean-up with the Cleveland Metroparks at this beach several miles west of Cleveland. As I usually find to be true, once up and going, I loved being out early for a 7 AM start. The weather was a bit unsettled that morning and when I arrived at Huntington, I could hear thunder in the far distance, with dark clouds hovering and shifting to the north, over the lake. Over the next hour while I walked the beach, I was able to see the sky in movement with sun and light playing hide and seek with the clouds. Eventually the clouds took over and there was local thunder, lightning and rain so I wrapped up my clean-up and headed for a cup of coffee.  

Edgewater Beach, Cleveland. This is a prominent beach and park just west of downtown Cleveland. It has a long history with some ups and downs. However, few can criticize the work to revitalize the beach that the Cleveland Metroparks have done since taking it over in 2013. I met a wonderful friend for a walk on a summer Friday. Before leaving I visited the main hub near the beach and found that there is a BookBox branch of the Cleveland Public Library right on the beach. Love this so much!  

Cleveland Lakefront Nature Preserve. This is a smaller property on the lake to the east of downtown. Overseen by the Port of Cleveland, it’s notable for its bird activity; it’s clearly a rest stop along the lake for our feathered friends. It’s a favorite family outing for us and we had a walk and picnic with cousins there in July.

Walking the perimeter trail of the small peninsula, on one side you are gazing eastward. On the other side you are gazing westward right at the Cleveland skyline. It’s also an angle that leaves me with some frustration. You see Interstate 90 running right along the lake and then after that Burke Lakefront Airport, a small, municipal airport used mostly for private and charter flights. Both seem like an unfortunate use of lakefront land. The city of Cleveland has long committed to reinventing the lakefront, but initiatives and projects have often seemed to stall.

I will have more small adventures before the leaves turn. But then it will be fall, which is really a miracle of a season, no?

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Summer is well underway in Ohio, and I have completed three of my six Great Lakes summer intentions. Over Memorial Day weekend, our family packed a picnic and took a day trip to Presque Isle State Park in Pennsylvania, under 90 minutes from Cleveland.

Pennsylvania doesn’t generally appear on the Great Lakes states list. The state’s shoreline is limited with 77 miles along Lake Erie between the Ohio and New York borders. The stretch is notable for two things – the city of Erie and the peninsula that juts out into the lake and has become Presque Isle State Park. 

Presque Isle starts four miles west of Erie and then arches like a scythe to the east, creating Presque Isle Bay on its southern shore. The peninsula’s protection enabled Erie to grow as a natural harbor. Almost all of the peninsula is now the state park and it has 13 miles of roads, 21 miles of recreational trails and 13 beaches.  

Our first stop was the Tom Ridge Environmental Center at the base of the peninsula. We ended up spending over an hour perusing the engaging exhibits.  

The center greatly impresses on you the fact that Presque Isle is in a constant state of geographic and ecologic change. Over time, winds and water have literally blown and pushed the land mass around. Now, of course, some of this change is monitored and managed. This was apparent once in the park when we reached an area off-limits near the North Pier with a gigantic mountain of sand and an official orange state construction sign that I somehow also found lightly charming: Beach Nourishment Underway

At the center I also learned about something I’ve never heard of before. There was a small exhibit with what looked like some broken tree branches inside. They were actually fossilized lightning, also known as fulgurite. On some occasions when lightning strikes the ground, it fuses soil, rock, and sediment together into a tube or clump. Nature’s answer to instant fossilization.    

We drove onto the peninsula. On the mainland it had been bright, sunny and warm; it was notably windier, cooler and foggier as we drove further out in the park. Beaches are sequentially numbered as you make your way out. We drove by the Presque Isle Lighthouse, a popular stop for a visit and photos. We drove by Sunset Point and there were colorful kites of all shapes and sizes, including inflatable ones (mini Macy’s Day balloons!), dancing around in the light fog.

Given the weather, we mostly enjoyed the park on foot, walking some of the trails, seeing the older houseboats that dot Horseshoe Pond, and peeking onto stretches of beach. There were wooded trails and the paved recreational trails that ran right along the shore. I would consider a return to the park some time with bikes; it would also be an ideal place for kayaking and a rewarding setting for birding.

The first weekend of June, I headed downtown on Saturday morning for local non-profit Drink Local Drink Tap’s annual 4 Miles 4 Water event. My parents were visiting that weekend and, wanting to get back to them quickly, I ended up walking the 1 mile event instead of running the 4. The event is very family-friendly and I resolved to return next year with a full team of family and friends.

This year I enjoyed the pre-race atmosphere and the Cuyahoga Riverfront in the early morning hours. It seemed both funny and entirely appropriate that against the backdrop of the DJ’s peppy soundtrack, a gigantic, aged laker ship was slowly navigating the curves of the river with the aid of a tugboat.

This post is dedicated to my mother-in-law Sue whose family has contributed over generations to the city of Erie, PA and who grew up going to the beaches on Presque Isle.

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When I tell people about my Great Lakes interest and engagement of the past three years, one of the things I say is that the Great Lakes have been a meaningful anchor for our family as well. It’s been a theme that winds through the year. It’s there all the time, but it’s never more present than in the beautiful summer months in this region.

I have been a long-time listener of the writer Gretchen Rubin’s podcast called Happier. In the podcast she shares and discusses a variety of topics related to happiness. One of the strategies that she has shared a number of times over the years is to “design your summer”. This means: embrace the different cadence of the months and make a plan for the things you want to do to maximize the season. I’ve thought about summers this way for about seven years now, and when fall arrives, I am happy that I was intentional with my time.

With that in mind, here are my Great Lakes intentions for Summer 2024:

#1 Beach Clean-up at Euclid Beach in May: I am a volunteer with the Cleveland Metroparks, and beach clean-ups are one of the many options available for volunteer hours. I love spending 2-hours on a weekend morning this way. The beach and parks are usually quiet, you can listen to music or a podcast and walk the beach or beach adjacent areas and pick-up large and small litter, preventing it from getting washed out into the lake.

#2 Visit Presque Isle State Park, PA over Memorial Day weekend: About a 90 minute drive, this will be an easy day trip for us that we have penciled in for the Sunday of the holiday weekend. Presque Isle State Park is a peninsula that juts out into Lake Erie a couple miles west of Erie, PA. Much of it is sandy beach, but it also has walking trails. We’ll start our visit at the Tom Ridge Environmental Center to learn more. Hopefully the weather will be good and we can pack lunch and head to explore and putter. “Park puttering” is one of my favorite frames for family time. We will hopefully walk some trails, but we might also poke around, hang around..  putter.

#3 Run 4 Miles 4 Water with Drink Local Drink Tap in June: Drink Local Drink Tap is a wonderful non-profit in Cleveland with a mission of solving global water equity through education, advocacy, and community-centered water, sanitation and hygiene projects. Their work engages and educates on water issues at both a local and global level. I will participate in one of their hallmark events that takes place in downtown Cleveland.  

woman lacing up her gray and pink nike low top athletic shoe
Photo by Tirachard Kumtanom on Pexels.com

#4 Watch a sunset at the Solstice Steps in Lakewood, OH in July: Lakewood City Park, a couple of miles from downtown Cleveland to the west, is one of my favorite local outings. My girls have always loved the large playground and I love the lakefront location and views. In 2015 the park opened the Solstice Steps, essentially stone bleachers built into a curving hillside at the park. They offer a fantastic view of the lake, especially looking westward. 

#5 Visit a Chicago-area beach over Labor Day weekend: We will be in Chicago over Labor Day weekend for a family event. There will be some time at the margins, and I will hope we can squeeze in a visit to a beach. As I wrote in a previous post about Lake Michigan, in the summer, Chicago really is a beach town.

#6 Visit Lake Erie Bluffs in September: Late August and September are beautiful months here. Many wildflowers and late summer flowers are in bloom. Temperatures are warm but usually not desperately hot. It will be a great time to head to one of my favorite places on Lake Erie, Lake Erie Bluffs park (introduced in my last post). 

I’m sure that some of these activities will provide content for future posts. I will report back! 

And how about you? Do you have a few things in mind you’d like to do this summer? Especially if they are Great Lakes related, but even if not, reach out and let me know what your intentions are. Perhaps taking a moment to share will feel like a gentle accountability mechanism to get them down on the calendar so that when fall comes, a few specific events will make the summer more vivid and memorable.  

summer letter cube on soil
Photo by Ylanite Koppens on Pexels.com
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This post is dedicated to my 10-year CLE-anniversary, which is this week on May 2, 2024. 

On May 2, 2014, my husband and I drove my then 16-month old daughter from Brooklyn to Cleveland to start a new life chapter. We took with us a decade of New York City memories. I had accepted a job that required me to start two months earlier than we had planned to move. My husband dropped my daughter and I and the car off with his parents and then flew back to NYC to finish his job commitment before joining us on July 1.

I have two memories from my early months in Cleveland when I distinctly remember thinking, I can be happy here. One was taking my daughter to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. After our visit, she was running around in Wade Oval, an open expanse of grass and trees in the middle of University Circle, a hub of cultural institutions in Cleveland – the Natural History Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Botanical Gardens, and the Case Western Reserve University campus among others. There was sun, and deeply green early summer grass.  She was romping and falling and investigating as all toddlers do. It felt good, and right, and promising.

The other memory is driving out to Lake Erie Bluffs, a park about 30 miles east of Cleveland in Lake County.

The park offers several different ways to experience Lake Erie. There is a gravel trail sitting atop the bluffs, running at a height above the shoreline that is best for a meandering walk, not a rigorous one. It’s an opportunity to feel breezes and look out over the water. Perhaps notice the different colors of the lake. Perhaps just listen to the water’s movement that day.

At one end of the trail is a 50-foot tall coastal observation tower. At the top you can look out over Lake Erie. Looking east, downtown Cleveland is visible in the distance. Looking south, you can see acres of marshland abutting the park. Looking north is nothing by the expanse of Lake Erie. 

Near the observation tower is a trail down to the water and 9,000 feet of shoreline. The beach can be of varying width depending on the lake levels, which change yearly and sometimes seasonally. My girls love puttering around on this strip of sand, rocks, branches and driftwood. 

It’s hard for me to believe, but I now have pictures from Lake Erie Bluffs over the span of a decade. An early visit in 2015 when we were just a family of three. A “date” with my older daughter in 2018 when she was still adjusting to life after her younger sister was born in 2017. A visit as a family during the pandemic lockdown months of 2020. A visit alone in September 2022 that I referenced in my prior blog post about walking along the water. A “date” with my younger daughter in 2023 while her older sister was away at sleepaway camp.

Of course, so many things have happened, and changed, and grown, and evolved in the ten years of our life since May 2014. And there are things that have moved, and shifted, and eroded, and appeared at the park in that time. But the place is still there. The lake is still there. That feels good, and right, and promising. 

Older daughter, 2015
Older daughter, 2018
The girls, 2020
Younger daughter, 2023
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My family ushered in the summer Memorial Day weekend with a day trip to Kelleys Island in Lake Erie. We closed it out Labor Day weekend with a day trip to Toledo and the National Museum of the Great Lakes. My takeaway from the visit: Immense respect for the role the Great Lakes region played in economy and nation building during the industrial era of the late 19th and first half of the 20th century. The work that happened here was dirty, dangerous, and with hindsight there are plenty of criticisms to lay at the feet of industrialization. But it was an era of ambition and sacrifice and this region, with a variety of rich resources, drove much of the growth and evolution. It was iron ore, coal and limestone that shifted the arc of the industrial age and the Lakes provided the means to move raw material as well as the steel that would build vehicles, railways, infrastructure and eventually skyscrapers across the United States. 

The museum has exhibits on exploration and settlement of the region, expansion and industry, safeguard and support, shipwrecks and safety, and maritime technology. Topics that particularly caught my interest and are worthy of their own posts: the history and role of the U.S. Coast Guard in the region; icebreaking in the Lakes to preserve shipping channels; and the Great Lakes most famous shipwreck – the SS Edmund Fitzgerald in Lake Superior in November of 1975. Stay tuned!

By coming in the summer months, we could also tour two boats docked in the Maumee River next to the museum – the Col. James M. Schoonmaker and the Ohio. The Schoonmaker particularly makes an impression. It’s enormous, austere, and stalwart. At 619 feet long and with a carrying capacity of 12,200 gross tons, it’s not hard to imagine the cavernous cargo hold filled with coal, grains and minerals as the boat plows through Great Lakes waters on routes from Duluth to Detroit to Toledo and back.

Before heading home we had a late lunch at the nationally famous Tony Packo’s Cafe. The restaurant is known for its Hungarian food and over 1,000 hot dog buns signed by celebrities and politicians over the past 50 years that adorn the walls (spoiler: the signed buns look real, but are fake). The restaurant was originally made famous by the character Corporal Maxwell Klinger in M*A*S*H, who referenced Tony Packo’s six times in the series (the actor Jamie Farr was from Toledo). 

The Midwest is often the brunt of jokes, overlooked, or underappreciated. It’s a region with numerous challenges of a wide variety. But it is a place – one with character, heart, and a rich history that I want my girls to know, analyze, and respect. 

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What makes an island special?  A couple things come to mind: Given their geographic distinction, islands are sometimes home to rare species or specialized ecosystems and for that reason can be important places of ecological research. They are often rest stops and nesting sites for birds. Islands may, due to their isolation, develop specific cultures among people who live or spend significant time there. And finally, their defining feature – land completely surrounded by water – can provide people with a place of rest and respite.

flock of white birds photo during sunset

There are approximately 35,000 islands in the North American Great Lakes. Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron is the largest freshwater island in the world at 1,068 square miles (it’s 100 miles across!).  This past weekend we spent a day on  a much smaller one – Kelleys Island in Lake Erie (4 square miles). 

It was all the things you want for a day trip – easy drive (90 minutes from our house), easy parking (in Marblehead, OH), and easy ferry ride (22 minutes). The ferry itself was a sensory experience for my girls – wind whipping hair around, the smell of fuel, the sound of the water as the boat cut through it. The famous Cedar Point roller coasters in Sandusky could be seen faintly in the distance, steel curling and arching like ribbon loops.

Upon arrival, we rented a golf cart and puttered north to Kelleys Island State Park. Our first stop was the Glacial Grooves Geological Preserve, the most widely known attraction on the island. In fact, the preserve is home to the most famous glacial grooves in the world and it was designated a National Natural Landmark in 1967. They are really quite stunning. Deeply and smoothly carved, the grooves look human-made and not the product of an ice sheet that retreated from the region approximately 14,000 years ago.      

After the grooves, we strolled over to the North Shore Loop Hiking Trail and down to the beach where you can rent kayaks and paddleboards. The girls were very excited about the golf cart and so we took a drive, first circling the eastern part of the island. We ended up finding the Kelleys Island Wine Co. and purchased lunch from the KI Cantina there. We settled into a brightly colored picnic table in the shade. The girls enjoyed looking at the cows and goats in adjacent pastures and watching people play horseshoes. We then circled the western part of the island and landed back at the main commercial area where we popped in some shops before heading back to the mainland. 

A Great Lake + an island + a golf cart + saltwater taffy from Missy Magoo’s Candy and Gift Shop = a solid start to summer.

top view photo of sliced watermelons
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I shared in one of my first posts that it was a solo retreat in January 2021 that launched a deeper relationship for me with the Great Lakes. I still seek that alone time on Lake Erie as a retreat from this complex and sometimes bewildering world.  

Eighteen months after my cottage in Geneva, Ohio, I returned east to Madison in September 2022 to stay at a tiny Airbnb right on the lake (for $95 a night!) called the Lemon Drop Cottage. Cuteness alert: despite being a sour fruit, cottage decor could not have been more sweet and cheerful! During this 36-hour retreat, I started writing content for this blog, read, and walked along the lake at Lake Erie Bluffs and Lakeshore Reservation, both Lake County Metroparks. 

I love walking generally – I find it tremendously restorative.  While I’ve never been able to truly get into a meditation practice, I find walking to be meditative.  The rhythm of the body in movement, feet cycling, and outdoor air flowing through the nose and lungs sets a cadence for my thoughts and emotions as they run their course. This feeling of self in the world – of presence – is especially the case if I can walk along the lake.

In her book 52 Ways to Walk, Annabel Streets references an expansive 2019 study that looked at the well-being effects of spending time by the sea. A dataset that included over 26,000 people living in England concluded that those living within a mile of the sea had better mental health and greater happiness markers than those inland. But from my read, the saltwater doesn’t appear to be the key variable. Things like environments with a sensory rhythm (waves), specific light patterns, and ambient sounds (birds, water) come up in descriptions of why the sea makes people feel good. I would argue that if it’s these things, then our inland seas offer them all (the wave action is real on the Great Lakes, albeit different in kind).

And for me, I personally love the lush forests that you often wind through leading right up to the lake.  Walking and then resting in the deep shade of a tree, looking out at the lake = a pure and honest contentment.     

On March 25, 2023 the New York Times published a worthwhile opinion article by the actor Andrew McCarthy titled “Whatever the Problem, It’s Probably Solved by Walking”. The piece included many of the profound thoughts from the ages about walking including an observation from the great John Muir: “I only went out for a walk… going out, I found, was really going in.” 

The precious summer months are here. Water or trees or city sidewalk: Go out. Go out. Go out.

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This coming weekend, April 21-23 is Adopt-a-Beach spring kickoff for 2023. Adopt-a-Beach is a program of the Alliance for the Great Lakes. If you live in the Great Lakes region, the Alliance can help you find a beach clean-up – or organize one! 

At a beach clean-up organized in coordination with the Alliance, there is a leader who helps distribute materials (e.g. gloves, buckets) and gives an overview of the data collection aspect of the clean-up. Adopt-a-Beach volunteers have been collecting data during beach clean-ups since 2003. To do this, someone is tasked with keeping track of what trash is being pick-up, and at the end of the event, the weight of it. 

The data has shown a number of things: Volunteers are removing close to 15 tons of trash from beaches each year. About 85% of this trash is made entirely or partially of plastic. 25% of litter picked up is food-related – like plastic cups, utensils and takeout containers. Much of the plastic collected are small pieces that have already broken down or off of a larger piece. These tiny pieces matter! During a cleanup it’s easy to realize that they are actually the most likely trash to be eaten by animals in and around the lakes when they mistake the microplastics for pieces of food.

Things that I love about beach clean-ups: on-boarding is quick, they are hands-on, physical activities outdoors, and they can be a great group or solo activity. 

I’ve participated in three different beach clean-ups thus far and each one was rewarding and satisfying in its own way. In July 2022 I was at Euclid Beach on Lake Erie at 7 AM on a Saturday morning on my own for a beach clean-up organized by the Cleveland Metroparks. Everything about the outing was a joy: the water was beautiful, the beach was quiet and there were few people out when I got started. By 8:30 when the clean-up ended, there were people walking and biking, a number of whom stopped to thank me for my efforts. I drove home with the windows open listening to a good podcast and was home in time for breakfast with my family.

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Where do you retreat from this complex world? How do you “draw back” (the Latin root meaning of the word) to find quiet, distance, perspective and connect with your inner world?

It was a solo retreat in the pandemic winter of 2020-21 that launched my personal relationship with the Great Lakes and established them as a place of rejuvenation and  joy. 

I spent nine and a half months of 2020 at home working full-time with a child or two by my side at various times. As a family, we reconnected with the natural world during our Pandemic Parks Tour of 2020. Between March and December that year, we visited 38 parks in Ohio (city, county, state and Cuyahoga Valley National Park). What else was there to do in those early months with then 7 and 3 year-old children?  

Many parks took us out into the woods and hills of Ohio where the Appalachian region transitions to Midwestern farm lands – truly underrated terrain in my opinion. Some of the parks were on Lake Erie. I have a picture of my older daughter from Labor Day 2020 swimming at the beach at Geneva State Park.  She looks like a Great Lakes mermaid happily lounging in clear, shallow waters stretched across an array of multicolored stones.  

However, by January 2021, the cabin fever in Cleveland was real. I had a singular workday that sent me spiraling. The intensity was a confluence of all the contextual elements of pandemic living, but for the first time in my life, I felt a loss of mental and emotional control. I knew I needed to find breathing space somewhere alone.

With the blessings of pandemic Ohio winter pricing, I rented a cottage for myself at The Lodge at Geneva-By-The-Lake an hour east of Cleveland for a Friday and Saturday night. The weather that Saturday I can only describe as somewhat magical for winter on Lake Erie. It was clear, with muted sunshine and lines and whisps of cloud. The temperature was in the high 30s, but there was absolutely no wind that day, making it feel warmer than it was. I spent three hours that morning walking in Geneva State Park along the lake, fascinated by the frozen bushes dripping with icicles, and absorbing the winter lake landscape.  

I strolled back to the beach where my Great Lakes mermaid had been swimming five months earlier and sat down. The beach was still sandy but the winter had built up snow banks at the edge of the water – large, undulating mounds of snow crusted with ice.  The lake was filled with floating ice close to the shoreline. As at any time of year by a Great Lake, there was that great, distant, unbroken dark horizon line where water meets an enormous expanse of blue sky.

The most remarkable thing about the beach that morning was the absolute, dead silence. The snow banks blocked any noise from the ice and water. The trees behind the beach had just sparse leaves, and with no wind, there was no rustling or whistling, or whispering. Once in a while I could hear a bird somewhere, calling out, but its exact location was distorted by the enveloping silence.

I was profoundly alone.  

And I was profoundly grateful.

I left the beach that day, and the cottage that weekend, having found the breathing space I needed at that moment and having an intrigue and curiosity about Lake Erie deepen into something else – a relationship that would become an anchor in my life.

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