My Basement Window

My name is David Curry, I’ll be 35 years old next week, and I live with my parents. In their basement. This is full disclosure, and something you should know, but not because I want you to feel sorry for me and for the fact that I had to take a shower this morning in a shower that left me feeling more like Chris Farley changing clothes in an airplane bathroom, and certainly not because I want to you feel all that much embarrassment for me. Instead, you should know that because my parent’s home, however humble it may be and however small and annoying the basement shower might be, is on the lake. This lake, the lake, the only lake that matters today and every morning on these pages and the only lake that should matter to anyone at any point in the history of time itself.

The windows in this basement bedroom are at ground level, and they look out over the lawn with the perspective that any small land animal knows very, very well. So these windows look out over lawn, over grass that has grown too tall over the past week, over the grass that since I live in my parent’s basement I will not agree to mow until my dad offers me either $5 or the keys to his car this coming Friday night. But the windows look past that grass and onto that lake, and last night as I walked into that somewhat musty basement bedroom, with the lights of the house off, and everyone asleep except me, I couldn’t help but lean against the ledge beneath those windows and look out to the lake. It was still and it was glowing, with the outline of the opposing shores visible, and few lights sprinkled up and down the eastern coast. It was a spring night that through those windows looked like a summer night. And I liked it.

These windows face East, like I said. At night, there is no sunset to behold and to snap pictures of and to ooo and ahh over. But in the morning, when these west facing windows and dull and dim, these old east facing windows are alive and bright and full of life. This happens early, even now. It must have been before five when the first light slowly seeped through those windows and onto my face. Then, more of it, buckets and buckets of light, flooding the room and ruining my sleep. I woke up entirely too early, stood to make sure I still could, and looked again out the windows. The glow of late night had been replaced by a sheet of visible, tangible glass. The colors were those of a high gray sky mixed with the pale green shoreline, and the only waves I could see were created by two loons that broke the surface now and again to grab a breath of air before returning to raid the depths for some omega3.

After the shower wherein I bruised my elbows on the walls and the door and knocked the bottle of soap off the too-skinny ledge at least twice, I returned to the bedroom and to those basement windows. The silver lake that I had left 10 minutes before was now alive with color, with oranges and reds and still some silver, but only so much of it that hadn’t yet been pushed aside by the sun as it worked and burned and struggled to free itself from the haze of those high clouds. The lake was the same, still, glass, but totally different. It was different the night before too, and much more different in pictures show early during the day before, when the wind tossed the surface and the blue sky reflected perfectly onto even deeper blue water. The lake had, in the period of several hours, changed outfits at least four times and dazzled in every one of them.

I suppose this is the power of a lakefront home. That home can have a musty basement, a small shower, a futon that your son sleeps on that is of questionable origin (garage sale, or just set by the road for the trash man?) but none of that matters much once you stop looking around you and instead look out the windows. The lake is always there, always the same, but always different. Spending the next four days in that basement while I kill the transition between rental and the new home move in date might not be ideal, but the scenery can’t be beat.