Hi, everyone,
Welcome to this site! I’m happy to have you here. In these initial posts, I’d like to share excerpts from my new book Coming Home. This first excerpt is the introduction to the personal essay “The Village at Lakeside,” a piece about the very special place where I grew up. I hope you enjoy it!
I am at the beach, sitting on a large rock at the shoreline. The old willow shading me has been dropping fuzzy brown corkscrews. Their sharp, woodsy smell drifts on the breeze and fills my nostrils with the memory of Grandma and Grandpa’s cottage several miles west along the old Lakeshore Road. The water is clearer now than when I was a child; I can see through the shallows the regular ridges of soft sand, tufts of seaweed floating above, veins of light shimmering and shifting with the incoming waves. Ducks are playing on the surface of the lake, squawking and flapping at each other. Sometimes a graceful pair glides by, the male’s head a brilliant bottle green.
And always there is the plashing, gulping sound of water hitting stone, the rhythmic shush of waves fanning along the sand where the rocks end and the beach begins. The sound of the waves was the music of my childhood, the lake wind its breath. My sight was formed by the vast stretch of the horizon, the limitless vault of blue above it. That open horizon gave me an aching for eternity. Here at the shore I learned to look, to discover in the beauty and solitude a presence, immutable as the great lake itself, watching, listening, waiting.
Lori Vos 