The Moods of Water and Life

Each working day I cross Lake Pontchartrain. Twenty-four miles one way on the Causeway Bridge. It isn't a sea but like a sea it has moods. Friday afternoon it was gray-green and seething, dimpled with rain and with white caps breaking like horses's manes in the wind. Whereever sunlight punched through the clouds to strike the water the liquid color turned to a toxic saffron that looked like old bruises.

Today the lake was a light steel-blue that flirted with the bright morning sun. Sparks of refraction ignited here and there as a faint breeze petted the surface. Sunlight and water played together, happy as any two children during summer vacation.

I'm learning a lot about the moods of water on my daily trips. And about cycles of life along the Pontchartrain basin. The pelicans are starting to glide right along the bridge railing again, as they did last year at this time. There must be some seasonal wind change that accounts for it. Suddenly the Sulphur Butterflies are out in force, not along the bridge yet but in the trees and along the roads toward my house. The love-bugs are here too. I see the early ones perched on my car, or on the railing of our deck, already mated. I know there'll be more soon, until the air is thick with love.

I'm glad I've kept notes of such things in my journal, because I can go back and see clearly the cycles of how water and the biosphere around it ebbs and rises through the seasons. This year I plan to keep better records of when things happen. I figure there's a story in there somewhere. Or perhaps just a life.