Lake Superior Neighbors

Our neighbor died a few weeks ago. My enduring image of him is him loading his very light canoe on top of his car in the early morning hours. Later, after the day had gotten its start, I’d see him unloading his canoe. The canoe was so light, so thin and feathery, that he could carry it like a box of balloons from his car to his garage.

He canoed on Grand Sable Lake in the U.P. and wrote poems about what he saw – the birds and turtles, the sky’s blue. He wrote poems about other things as well – relationships and disappointments, people he had known, days and nights – and published his poems in books. He read his poems to a gathering I attended, and I marveled later that I lived next door to a poet.

He sat at our table many times. Once, after we attempted to have a fish boil on the beach, he carefully remarked that the fish was “still translucent” and that made me sad after all our effort with hauling firewood and constructing a way to hang the large pot just so over the fire. But it was the truth, and he was the only one who spoke it.

He is not the first neighbor to die. Our other neighbor died several years ago. My enduring image of him is him standing on a tall ladder painting the side of his new house. He is shirtless in the sun and even from a hundred yards away, I see that he is happy in what he is doing.

Both neighbors met difficult ends. The one neighbor didn’t drown doing what he loved and the other didn’t fall off his ladder with a smile on his face. There was much pain and suffering and extraordinary difficulty encountered by both men and their families. But what I remember about them is their brightness, their love of the day, their optimism – for a smooth paddle on a serene lake with the famous Sable Lake eagle flying overhead or for a finished beach house that grandchildren never met would love as their own.

People never know what image of them will endure. But I know this much – it’s the image that carries the glow of life, not the sorrow. That’s what lasts.

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Photo by David M. Chambers on Unsplash