"The Sounds of Silence"

We get in late at night. That sharp smell of pine will instantly advise that we have arrived. The cabin has electricity now so getting situated is easier than it used to be. In the old days I learned why a refrigerator is also called an “ice box”. Not because it makes ice cubes but because of that big block of ice that we bought in town to keep the box cold and to chip at for ice in our drinks. It’s been a long drive so we’ll unpack tomorrow. It’s time to sleep.
I always sleep well after a thirteen hour drive but I wake at first light. Some fifty feet from the door is the lake that I see in a dream. The cool mist that forms from the brisk night air is unveiled by the morning sun. From the vantage of the dock the scene is surely surreal. As I gaze outward into the cloud-like haze, nothing is visible except this obscurity. In a short while the sun grows stronger and the dense fog begins to retreat. It lingers above the water now and soon the far side of the lake will come ambiguously into view.
The lake itself, some two and a half miles long by a half mile across is, in its expanse, in a glass-like calm. The only break in this tranquility might come from the endless wake of a small fishing boat. But in the morning, this calm is almost never broken. The placidness is however, with luck, broken by a pair of loons. They call to each other. The sound can be quite lonesome or eager. Their communication is a mystical sound against the quiet morning.
I’ll go inside and make some coffee now. We are really here again. I wonder how anyone could live here year-round and, just perhaps, see these beginnings to the day as unremarkable, as just another morning.