The expressiveness of Lake Michigan continues to astonish me. Grown used to the reliably distant Pacific, I find it almost impossible to believe that the same body of water can be as cerulean as the Caribbean one day, green-gray as some Baltic sea the next, then the metallic blue of the Mediterranean, then today an indigo as perfect as a summer sky brewing cumulus clouds. I feel as if I had left a beautiful but cold woman to be near one possessed by a range of passions I barely know the names of. Excuse my prosody: I do not believe I have ever considered the beauty of weather, having sprouted under skies filled with rain clouds for most of the year, and reached my full stature in a place where umbrellas and frowns are wielded whenever the sky ceases to be a spotless blue.

How lovely it must have been here in the grasses around Fort Dearborn. Riding the bus up Lakeshore Drive after work, looking out through the fields at a mass of sailboats, I had a sort of vision, a brief moment of ignorance of where I was, in which I remembered the vast emptiness of this place, desolate as any mountaintop. How glorious, this city rising out of the plain, its spires and battlements.

You see how easily certain things get into my blood.

(cdm | LakeAndPrairie)