The Night Lake

When your line in the sand is a lake that only appears at night

Tuesday morning I woke up on our land, greeted by the sunrise and an eerie bank of fog settled into the hills beyond, almost like a lake had come in the night.

A night lake.

you’ll just have to trust me that it looked more like a lake in person

The wildflowers had been mostly replaced by hip-high grasses that stirred up the histamine in my system, and the onions were still here - flowering purple for an absurdly long season, ready to seed the next generation. Our neighbor woke up somewhere out of our line of site, but his sounds came from the space between our aspens and the clouds beyond.

“Ok, party’s over. Go on. Party’s over.” He repeated while banging pots and pans.

What is he chasing off? Elk? The coyotes we heard last night? The night lake?

Cows, I saw eventually as the sun peeked between the hills and backlit their low, slow regression northward.

The silence returned. The lake did not budge.