In spring we swell full with waters from upstream, brought down from broken mountains under the power of the nearer sun. Our pale ice-blanket weakens, then cracks, then splits into floes, then reintegrates into watery darkness. Warmed, we wake from sleep. At sunset our rocks trade the hooting calls of loons, drawn by the clarity of our waters, strained through by the zebra mussels that have hold of our ancient buildings. Frogs, until now dormant, wriggle free from sediment and begin their hunting and dying. In spring our waters are deepest, our concrete tanks invisible from the surface. The mussels make their homes in our office spaces, in our aerators, in our lockers.

The skeleton of a truck re-becomes a reef. A human from the village assesses our waters, then jumps in, defiant of the cold. The pads and flowers of yellow floating heart build dense mats that overwhelm our banks; the human emerges, shivering. Rain begins to fall, the world continues to warm, and when the human leaves, a bit of our concrete washes away.

Once, humans loved us as much as the mussels do.

* * *

Our waters heat as the sun creeps ever upward in our sister sky. The insects thrive: mosquitoes and blackflies and dragonflies whose nymphs emerge from the waters, reach their apex, and eat and make children. Our drifts of plankton, starved and suffocated, are fewer now than last year. We do not remember what came before the zebra mussels that coat our rocks and blanket our concrete rooftops. Nor does the human, who returns more than others to swim in our too-clear waters. If we do not remember our ancestral past, then we know our present: the human, gasping for breath at our broken surface, diving again and again to examine our deep-down ruins. Our digester is their greatest interest: scum-skinned, spherical, half-buried in sediment and anchored in the earth. A pike noses through the deep weeds in our south and surveys its territory. The human’s fellows gather our zebra mussels, but they do not like them. They are never hungry enough to pose a threat to the mussels.

The human—our human?—smacks a blackfly from its wet thigh, not maliciously, only in the course of things. It comes, dives, goes away in a dozen repeated migrations. Meanwhile our remaining detritivores do what they can to maintain us. We cannot keep up with our own slow death from incompletion, but we do try. We do survive.

* * *

The cooling days begin. Even those of us who have not lived longer than a year see signs of change. We, too, must change. Loon parents begin their migration, leaving their children to make their own way south; pikes stalk schools of prey. Yellow floating heart will cling to our shores as long as it can; the zebra mussels will wait until the cold truly reaches them to go dormant.

Our human knows our invisible places now. Its migrations are fewer but never briefer. And today, using a tiny dull blade, they chip mats of mussels from the spherical digester to reveal the fibreglass beneath. Surely they must know it will develop a skin again.

But what is an attentive human except a priest? What is a beloved place of pilgrimage except a shrine? We have always been divine—the loons know this—but our ruins are human-made. Perhaps our priest recognizes something in our spherical digester. It puts magic into the structure by loving it well.

Out of gratitude, out of desire, out of desperate need, we put our magic—the sum of all our creatures—into the human in return.

Its heartbeat joins our thousands, and that heart rushes suddenly. The human pushes away from our digester, but in plankton and in pondweed we reach out. Bubbled breath, shaped around a cry, surges up through the water. We encircle the human with our magic. Its heart settles. Flailing arms slow to a purposeful tread. Gaze points inward.

No, little one, you are still your own; we have taken nothing away. We only give you the gift of our wholeness. In exchange, we ask for a time of stewarding.

And so we are the lake, we are the buildings beneath the water’s surface; and we are with our priest. The ice-blanket closes over our waters. Crayfish comb our floor: we live beneath, recovering from the year’s movements, and we are also in the village. We are lakeside and sleeping bivalves, and we are sitting fireside and sewing, and we are powering a new magic as our priest learns to clean water (the power of mussels) and hunt more sharply (the lesson of the pike) and speak with birds (the wisdom of the loon).

We are unforgotten. The balance is tipping into place.

In spring, we will begin again. This time we will have help.

* * *

Ⓒ D.A. Straith