The Lakewalk

Every morning since I came home, I've walked the Lakewalk before going in to the office. I park by the rose garden at Leif Erikson Park, walk down to the Lift Bridge and back, and then climb the stairs and sit at my desk smelling of lake, which Owen says is a fine smell on a person and a strange one on a laptop.

I walked this path a thousand times as a teenager and never once looked at it. I was busy, and the lake was just there, the way your own front door is there. I look at it now. I can't seem to stop.

When I got back in March the lake was wide open, hardly any ice on it at all. Everyone told me I'd missed winter, that it had been the warmest anyone could remember, brown at Christmas, the ski hill making its own snow. Then, at the end of the month, the biggest storm of the year came through and closed the schools, and I walked the Lakewalk in snow to the tops of my boots, past people shoveling with the expressions of people who had been promised something.

Now it's April, and the lake is cold and green-gray and enormous, and different every morning. Some days it's flat as a plate. Some days it comes over the rocks below the path and leaves a skin of ice on the railings. One morning a fog came in so fast it took the Lift Bridge out of the sky while I was looking at it, and the only way I knew the bridge was still there was the horn. The boats are back. The first big ones of the season came under the bridge while I was still unpacking, and now I count them on the way to work, the way I counted cars as a child.

In Seattle I had the Sound and Lake Washington, and I loved them, but they were scenery. This lake is weather. It decides what the day will be, and you find out on the walk.

I'm still in my mother's spare room, which we both call temporary. It has the good bed, and the stain on the ceiling that's the shape of Lake Superior, and it's very strange to fall asleep every night under a picture of the thing I walk beside every morning.