September 22, 2026 Post by : Editorial Reflections

The lake froze in early December, three weeks earlier than usual. I knew it was coming, of course. The nights had been clear and cold, and the shallows had been skimming over for days. But there is a difference between knowing a thing and seeing it. One morning I looked out and the whole lake was white, still, silent. The heron was gone. The loons were gone. Even the wind seemed to have gone somewhere else.

I will be honest. I grieved. I had spent the fall sitting on the dock every evening, watching the water, and now the water was a floor. It did not move. It did not reflect. It did not do any of the things I had come to depend on. I stood at the window with my coffee and felt a kind of loneliness I had not expected.

Learning to Read a Different Surface

For the first week, I did not go outside much. There did not seem to be a point. But then one afternoon, I put on my boots and walked down to the dock, just to see. The ice was thicker than I had thought. Clear, too, in places, so you could see straight down into the dark water below, which was still there, still moving, just under a lid.

I crouched down and looked. A fish went by, slow and unhurried. A cluster of weeds swayed in a current I could not feel. The lake was not dead. It was just quiet. It was doing something underneath that I could not see, and it would do it all winter, and in the spring it would open up again, and nobody would remember the ice except me.

I started walking out on the lake after that. Not far, and never alone, and always with a pole to test the ice, but I walked. The surface was different every day. Some days it was smooth as glass. Some days it was cracked and groaning, shifting under my feet like something alive. Some days there was snow on top, and I could see tracks. Fox, mostly. Once, a deer. The lake had become a field, and the field had its own stories.

What Waiting Actually Asks of Us

Winter is a long season here. It asks you to wait, and it does not tell you how long. That is the hard part. The lake does not promise to thaw on a particular day. It just freezes, and then it waits, and you wait with it, and there is nothing you can do to hurry it along.

I have learned to love the waiting. I have learned that the frozen lake is not a lake that has stopped being a lake. It is a lake in a different mood. It is a lake that has gone inward. And there is something in that, I think, that I needed to learn. There are seasons in a life when the surface goes hard and nothing seems to be moving. The temptation is to panic, to break the ice, to force something. But the lake does not do that. The lake just waits, and underneath, the water keeps moving, and the fish keep swimming, and the weeds keep swaying, and eventually the sun comes back and the ice lets go.

I am writing this in February. The ice is still thick. But the days are getting longer, and I can hear the first drips from the roof, and I know it will not be long now. I will wait. I have learned how.

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