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It’s Howling
By Nancy Lindquist | April 4, 2007
The house is shaking with the slap of the wind today. Gusts of forty miles per hour sent our trash cans into the neighbors yard. I love it.
I’ve never been a warm and sunny day person. Warm and sunny is nice and all, but it’s unremarkable. Give me screaming wind, sideways rain and the boom of thunder, anytime. Gray and dreary makes me feel alive and renewed.
I think it started when I was a child. I swam in Lake Michigan almost every summer day. The placid days were fun, but the days the waves kicked to six feet and were too dangerous to venture out in, drew me. I never listened to water reports. I’m lucky to be alive today. Of course when you’re sixteen, you’re going to live forever. Now I would not think about it.
A thunderstorm coming up over the lake sucked my breath from my body, leaving me trembling with fear and a thrill that no horror movie can match. I loved the lake.
My dad is seriously thinking about selling the house on the lake. He’s getting too old to keep it up and his wife was almost killed on her commute to work this past winter. She drives over an hour everyday and the ice on the stretch of highway is notorious. Her car was totaled.
I am happy he’s thinking about moving. Dad can barely walk up the stairs, anymore. I’m sad for me. I spent my early life in that house. I lived there until I was eighteen. I came back on and off for a couple years, but I was out for good, by the time I was twenty-two. I miss the house. I miss the lake.
I wish I could buy the place, but a house on Lake Michigan is out of my price range. Heck it’s out of most peoples price ranges. It’s gone up in value tremendously in my lifetime. It’s not going to happen. The last of my ties to my hometown will be no more. Yes, my mom and son are buried there, but they’re not there. Not anymore.
I’m sad. Really sad to let this go. I accept that it’s time. That does not alleviate the ache.
