Although the mornings are still cold, although the rains are more like early spring rains, I’ve begun swimming in the lake again. A few weeks ago, I swam in Nicola Lake while there on a picnic with my brothers and their wives; last Friday morning I swam in Meech Lake, in Gatineau, swatting black flies as I entered the water and left it. But this lake is the one I’ve known since 1979 when John brought me here, to a place I’d never been, and wondered how I’d feel about living in the area. There was no beach then. I’ve written this before. You pushed your way into the water through hardhack and wild mint. Now there’s a small beach area, enhanced with sand trucked in by the regional district every winter. Every winter but this one, for some reason. (The photograph is from last year. This year the sand near the water’s edge has washed away and you have to avoid the rocks on your way into the water.)
Yesterday, something quite large jumped as we approached the water. A fish! And then I noticed the surfacings everywhere. A hatch of something — mayflies would be appropriate, wouldn’t they, on the 22nd of May? — was providing good feed for the cutthroat in the lake. As I pushed out into deep water, I could see little flies on the surface. And there, and there, and there: trout rising.
The water was cold. The weather is still uncertain. Yesterday afternoon it got quite warm so I’m hoping the lake will be warming up, just a little. I like it cool. While I swam, I was thinking, trying to come up with a title for the memoir coming out next year. From my perspective, it has a title, the one that I recognized as soon as I saw the phrase in the Julia Kristeva essay I was reading, partly in preparation for writing the long essay of my own that became a memoir.
Let a body venture at last out of its shelter, take a chance with meaning under a veil of words.
But it seems that it’s not right for marketing a book so the publishing team (I’m included in this) are trying to find something that is, well, more obviously on topic. I’ve just worked through the second round of edits and nothing suggests itself. So far, nothing has. When I read the manuscript, I am back in those years, bittersweet.
Under a veil of words, I wrote about something that happened 47 years ago. 46 years ago I’d begun to swim in the lake that is just around the corner from the house I built with my husband (this matters: my memoir references it; and it is central to my life, then and now). And now, late morning, my body ventures into cold water, where trout are surfacing, and all the old memories too.
...Theresa Kishkan 