Hi everyone,

Goose Lake is icing over. Starting from the shores, the sheets are edging toward the center, leaving a passage that grows narrower each hour. This morning a few geese are navigating their way like silent ships working through the channel.

On the surface of things, all is quiet on the lake, save for the geese with their legs churning them along through frigid water. I’m thinking of the frogs and turtles of summer; the local birds, toads, worms, insects — all the life that sang love songs and tilled the soil and patrolled water and built nests and sunned on rocks.

Some have left. Some have perished. But most are still here, making do with temperatures cold enough to freeze a human to death, days and nights when food is scarce or nonexistent. How each member of the Goose Lake community weathers the weather would fill books, has filled books. Winter is a vital time, a time to rest, wait it out, survive. The trees, standing naked in the wind, bare limbs raised as though in surrender, wind chimes dangling like noisy baubles clanging out the time till spring, know.

Hi everyone,

Beauty is sometimes found in unexpected places, even in the death of an insect.

At rest with wings spread, a perfect Hackberry Emperor floats above the new floor of our pool. Looks like the butterfly didn’t live long after it emerged from its chrysalis late in the season. Probably perished when untested wings brought it too close to the water, its fleeting beauty, found art, part of life’s cycle at Goose Lake.

Hi everyone,

Last night I grilled burgers accompanied by a neighbor’s cat while the moon gazed at itself in the water.

It doesn’t take long to grill burgers but the brief time spent in such good company was a highlight of my day. I don’t know yet if I will write about it. You never know when a prompt might present itself to your muse. I’ll let you know if something happens.