Children's Book: The Lake That Comes and Goes

Posted by Thomas Price in the ReGen Civics community forum.

**The Lake That Comes and Goes**
*a story from Sand Angel*

Marni's grandmother lived where the road turns to dirt, at the edge of a valley so wide that mountains stood on every side like quiet giants in a circle.

On the land there was a lake that was not always a lake.

"Where does the water go?" Marni asked the first morning, standing at the edge of a flat silver bowl of mud.

"It goes into the ground," said Grandmother, "and into the sky, and it comes back when the land calls it. Some things you can't hold. You can only be ready for them."

That week they walked the fence line, all the way around, and Grandmother showed Marni the truck that carried a whole house folded inside it like a puzzle. "One day we'll put it up," Grandmother said, "and people will come sleep here, and wake up to the cranes."

Marni planted a cottonwood seed in a paper cup. She wanted to plant it by the not-lake, but Grandmother shook her head.

"When the water comes back it would drown. Trees need us to think about where water will be, not where it is."

So they planted it on the rise above the lake bed, in soil Marni loosened with her own hands, and Grandmother read the seed packet the way other people read fortunes.

At night the sky was so dark that the stars did not twinkle — they burned. Marni lay on a blanket and Grandmother pointed: that bright band is the whole rest of our galaxy, looking back.

"Does the land miss the water?" Marni asked.

"Every day," Grandmother said. "But it doesn't get smaller while it waits. It gets ready."

The next year Marni came back in spring, when the cranes came through — thousands of them, gray wings and red caps, calling to each other over the valley. The lake was a lake again, shining, and her cottonwood had put out five green leaves on the rise above it.

A boy from the city was visiting too, sleeping in the new round house with the curved roof. He was very quiet at breakfast. At dinner he was less quiet. By the third day he was laughing at the cranes, and teaching Marni a song he knew, and Grandmother said the land does this to people — it does not hurry them, it just gives them room.

"What will this place be when I'm grown?" Marni asked.

Grandmother looked at the lake, and the tree, and the garden rows they were digging for spring, and the long fence line catching the last gold light.

"It will be whatever we loved enough to build slowly," she said. "That's all anything good ever is."

*— end*

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