I’ve held a memory of my mother from the time I was a little boy. I recall being on the shore of a lake, and she had just swum across the entire lake and back. It was a feat that made an impression on me that has lasted more than half a century. A fragment of a memory from so long ago, it’s almost like a dream. I’ve always wondered where we were at the time.
Cut to the present day. For many years it had been a fantasy of mine to rent a house in my hometown in Ohio so that, when I visit my father, who now lives in a city a half an hour from there, I could re-experience what it was like to stay – and wake up – in my hometown. I shared that fantasy with my father one day, and he offered to contact some friends of his that lived on Turkeyfoot Island, located on a lake adjacent to my hometown, where they had a pensione for use by guests of the island residents.
The connection was made and, ever since then when I go to visit, I stay in that pensione, which has been essentially converted into a B & B. (It’s more like a lonesome, perhaps lightly haunted farmhouse out in the country somewhere; though I’ve stayed there many times, I’ve never seen another guest – which is great during the daytime, but to be honest, a little spooky when you’re going down the hall to the ‘shared’ bathroom late at night!)
I’ve yet to encounter any ghosts, however, and if you ask me, this has to be one of the most beautiful spots in the world. You can sit out on the patio overlooking the lake on a balmy, Midwest summer’s night, breathe in the earthy scent of the lake, and listen to the geese honking as they fly low across the water.
Coincidentally, directly across the lake is the public park where we used to go swimming when I was a kid. One afternoon as I was sitting on the patio, looking across the lake at the bobbing buoys separating the swimming area from the rest of the lake, it suddenly struck me that THIS was the location of that long-held memory! I was staying on an island which, when I was a boy, I had no idea existed, but to which my mother had swum that day, so many years ago. If it weren’t for the laws of physics, and time travel were an option, I could be sitting there on the patio as my young mother swam up to the shore and turned around – and also sitting on the beach across the lake as a child, awaiting her return!
There is a photograph taken from the “secret” back stairway that connects the upstairs rooms with the ground-floor kitchen of the pensione. The kitchen is off-limits to guests, and the main kitchen door is locked. But if you know about the stairs, you can sneak a look at the sailboats moored on the grass, through this window –
and store some stuff in the ’fridge!
– Excerpted from Wabi-Sabi – Decay, Emptiness, and Other Ephemeral Beauty