I have worked with paint and color for most of my life and you would think choosing a color for our walls wouldn’t be so difficult. We are choosing a white and I pictured picking up a few paint chips to try, maybe an eggshell, cream or the ever-popular off-white, but the paint chart has 56 different shades of white. They begin with cool whites and move to warm whites and I am totally influenced by the name of the paint. How can I ignore Casa Blanca, Alabaster, Steamed Milk or Medici Ivory and choose Reliable White or Modest White. I can’t do it.

We are stuck between Downy, Marshmallow and White Duck. I have looked at them in sun, shade and in the bathroom. I put them next to the wood trim and other whites in our house. If you took them off the page and asked someone what color it was they would say. “White”.

Who could overlook Fragile Beauty, Maison Blanche or Greek Villa? Will I feel better if we choose Restful White or cooler with Windfresh White?

Such problems, but given the world today, spending time talking and thinking about color or absence of color, I would wish these kinds of problems on everyone.

We had poetry book when I was little called Hailstones and Halibut Bones and I loved reading what each color felt like and the mood they could create. Thank you Mary O’Neil

 

What Is White?

White is a dove and lily of the valley

and a puddle of milk spilled in an alley — —

a ship’s sail, a kite’s tail, a wedding veil

Hailstones and halibut bones

and some people’s telephones.

The hottest and most blinding light is white.

And breath is white

when you blow it out on a frosty night.

White is the shining absence of all color

then absence is white, out of touch, out of sight.

White is marshmallow and vanilla ice cream

and the part you can’t remember in a dream.

White is the sound of a light foot walking

White is the beautiful broken lace

of snowflakes falling on your face.

You can smell white in a country room

toward the end of May in the cherry bloom.

 

Deep North

By Emma Campbell

 

Emerge from the black water

Drenched with smells of walleye and weeds

Smooth bubbles glide nasty leech seekers to grill crisp in my mouth

Pine seeps off into the dusk until smells of light take over

Leaf piles pucker up to the drooping sunflowers

The hay rolls line up on small hills for a nap against the sunset

Honey drizzled squash on plates of peeled birch

My own circle of the north woods beaming

Kayak past deserted cabins, and row hard

While lily pads sponge murk become less bewitching

Sway sweet peach tree lips, away goes the lightning storm

Winter corn is mown in the aftermath

 

 

Emma has managed to include all the magical things we love about Long Lake. I wish for every child to have a week on a lake. No smooth blue bottom pool, but a few weeds, clamshells and rocks to contend with and to feel a small fish nibble their toes.

But now the lake had a frozen arc in the bay and the geese had come to rest and squawk before flying south. They were sitting on the thin ice or paddling near by and would suddenly take off as if called away on an emergency.

We heard them as we walked down the ice-covered road to see the new roof on our cabin. We had thought a great deal about the color of the shingle and suddenly it didn’t matter. It was there. This is a big change for us. Nothing at the farm has really changed in years, perhaps the occasional light bulb. We have loved and loathed this fact. The house has been there waiting frozen solid all winter until we appear in summer and clean, dust, swim, cook, bike, walk and dance. Then as quickly as it begins, summer ends, we read a poem, pull the shades, and the house waits again.

Now the farmhouse has a new neighbor. We spread our wings and leave the nest and yet rejoice in the comfort this spot provides.

Is it too late for me to be a limnologist? I could study inland lakes, rivers, streams and wetlands.   I would find out about the lake that has beckoned us to the north. It is called Long Lake, only one of many long lakes I’m sure. But realistically I think my study would not be so scientific as to warrant a title. Instead, I would focus on the beautiful subtle colors of rocks that line the shore, or that glimpse of green or blue shining through the trees, and the glass-like surface, so I can decide if it will be a good morning to kayak. If I lie on the dock and look down into the water I can clearly see the bottom of the lake, it is sandy and speckled with rocks and the occasional clamshell. I would make note of a snail shell bobbing along the surface. Soft green seaweed waves back at me. I would know about how the color of the lake reflects the sky, and that the colorless cold gray day feels so different from a warm sunny day. The lake has the power to change my mood, but it also is a physical force. We pull our dock out of the lake in the fall so that the fierce north wind won’t send chunks of frozen ice slamming into the shore and shatter the wood into splinters.

On occasions a prehistoric type turtle head surfaces and reminds me that I am not swimming alone, the fish that jumps or the little muskrat aren’t quite so primeval.

Our Long Lake is 19 miles long.   It really is a long lake with depths of 70’ in some areas. It is a spring- fed lake, and many people drive to the source at the far north end of the lake to fill up gallon jugs of cold drinking water.  There is a small space to pull your car over and then on the lake side of the road is an unremarkable metal faucet sticking out of the ground with water running freely. There is a tin cup hanging nearby for a cold drink of spring water. It always seems odd to leave with the water still running.

Long Lake is the Walleye Capital of Wisconsin and is home to loons, bald eagles and herons. The health of a lake can be measured by how many nesting pairs of loons are on the lake during the summer. I think there is somewhere about 7 or 8 pairs a summer on our lake and they are counted and checked on by a group of volunteers known as Loon Rangers. More volunteers on the lake inform boaters to check their propellers and bilge water for invasive plant species like curlyleaf pondweed that may have traveled on their boats to Long Lake, these plants will choke a lake with a thick bed of weeds.

Ancient logs rest on the bottom of Long Lake from the logging era, old weathered boat houses lean improbably along the shore, a tree grips the bank with long roots but dangles over the clear water and falls when no one is looking.

Summer comes and the thick ice that you could drive on in your truck is now gone, no evidence. A pontoon boat goes by and we wave in celebration of another day on Long Lake.

There is nothing more important to all of us who love the lake than taking care of this gift.

“How often we speak of the great silences of the wilderness and of the importance of preserving them and the wonder and peace to be found there. They will always be there and their beauty may not change, but should their silences be broken, they will never be the same.” Sigurd F. Olson

Thank goodness I have a sister.

Together we take care of our family’s ancient farmhouse on a lake in northern Wisconsin. This house, forest and almost all the neighboring land around it belonged to our great grandparents, or other relatives. Our maternal grandparents from the Czech Republic vacationed in the north woods and bought 2 farms during the depression from our Norwegian paternal relatives.

So a vacationing city girl meets a local country boy and voilà! The home movie that sums up this union is an image of my practical Norwegian grandparents, looking a bit like a Grant Wood painting, sitting outside on a summer day in those curved metal lawn chairs, while my mom wearing her Catalina swimsuit is doing a dance in the lawn á la Theda Bara from The Vamp.

Janice and I spent every summer of our lives at Long Lake even the pouty teen years.

We drove into the yard and our grandparents rang a bell to signal our arrival. All our cousins arrived from Minnesota and we had many lovely nights under the stars looking out over the beautiful lake and happily listening to our uncles and aunts tell stories of growing up in rural Wisconsin, freezing cold trips to the outhouse, a one room schoolhouse, and seeing the doctor in summer when he came to vacation on the lake.

We dreamed for years of building our own house, keeping the farmhouse, but having something new for our expanding family, and this vision is becoming a reality. Kevin and I are digging in those beautiful, mossy woods, in between trees softened by lichens, paths made by deer and a hidden mound where the bear spent the winter.

It is our responsibility and our greatest joy to keep telling the stories, and writing new ones as we go.

“We plant; we store the seedcorn. Our sons and daughters

topdress old trees. Two chimneys require:

Work, love, build a house, and die. But build a house.

–Donald Hall