When You Don’t Know What to Write, Just Say What Floats Up

A secret garden, a Great Lake, a storm, a cat

Lake Michigan, 1/10/2024

I am sitting at my desk, which cost $40 or so, and I am looking out at Lake Michigan. We had our first winter storm yesterday, late in the season for Chicago. I don’t know this from experience, as I’ve only lived here for three and a half weeks. I know it because people told me, over and over again: This is really late for our first snowstorm. It’s crazy this is the first one. This is highly unusual for us.

One older woman said, “It gets warmer every winter here.” I don’t doubt that’s true, overall. I read that this lake, which looks like a mostly-placid ocean,  currently has the least amount of winter ice on record. Chicago is America is the whole wide melting world.

There are waves on the lake every day, gentle for the most part. The weather forecast said the storm could produce occasional gusts of wind that might measure 40 mph, and that some waves might reach nine to fourteen feet high. A gale warning was in effect. My sister-in-law’s middle name is Gale, so I made a dumb joke about that over text.

Back home in New Jersey, where I was raised, they’ve had loads of flooding. There’s an old red mill in my home county, the picturesque centerpiece for many a photoshoot, and its environs are overrun with muddy, cold water. The prettiest restaurant patio on the river is engulfed.

Last night, my brother found a huge spider in the basement, and felt bad about killing it, but he couldn’t figure out if it was poisonous or not, and they have two little kids. So far their basement hasn’t flooded.

Back home, the biggest thing you can look at is the Atlantic Ocean. Here, it’s this lake, which has a surface area thrice the size of my home state.

There are choppy waves today, and they are very pretty. The sand is tan and the lake is a slightly greenish-blue and the sky is a slightly bluish-grey and the trees are bare and brown, except for the evergreens. I know by now that the water will change in color, a tiny bit or a lot, every hour of sunlight. Little lighthouses dot the shoreline. I think it would be interesting to walk out on the jetty – or do they call it a jetty here? – to be near those waves as they break. To be with them and among them but not of them. This is often how I approach people, too.

I like seeing the tiny walking and jogging people silhouetted against the Great Lake. They give me hope and encouragement, though they don’t know it. I remember reading that Minneapolis has the most physically active people of any city in the country, as per self-reporting. I don’t know where I read that, but it was years ago. I found that shocking, given their cold winters, but friends helped me understand that it is because of the cold that one must find joy in movement, in the natural landscape, in the few hours of sun and, indeed, in the snowy dark.

I don’t know if Chicago is like that, but I know somebody who used to ride his bike in all seasons, and I know somebody else who told me her wet hair froze and broke off one winter here.

In the Financial District of Manhattan, where I lived for two years (during the first and longest of my three New York-based sojourns) there is a secret public garden called the Elevated Acre. It is accessible via an escalator at 55 Water Street. It is a five-minute walk from my former home. I wish I had known it was there. Or maybe I read about it, and forgot. I was 27 and 28 and 29 when I lived there, mainly motivated by the desire for commercial success as an author and comedian – and, of course, for romantic love. I guess my mind was not on secret elevated gardens.

I learned about it, or re-learned about it, today. You never know all of what the morning emails may bring you.

I had been living among boxes, too sick for a few weeks to unpack, and the abundance of cardboard got to me so I finally took most of those boxes apart. I stored some in case I move again one day (a probable event, as I am a renter). I took others, loads of others, down to the big recycling Dumpster. I like saying hi to the people who work here. I like seeing the residents come in and out. So far I have only learned one resident’s name. I actually think they just moved out.

My cat is grey and fat and glorious and she’s sitting on one of two green armchairs I bought for $75 at a charity shop. I have fewer things here than in any home I’ve ever occupied, though I still possess more than I need. It pleases me to see so much bare space on the floors, and even the walls - though I grow lonelier without reminders of friends and art and past adventures, so I am making an effort to hang things there.

There’s the cat’s perch, what I call her lookout tower, and the scratching pad/ramp that leads to it. There’s the circular little coffee table made of scrap wood I bought for $150 or so, back when I lived in Los Angeles (the second time). There’s an end table my friend Katie gave me when she was de-cluttering her place in Brooklyn.

The bigger investment is the $250 armoire from the same charity shop. It is beautiful, from the estate of an elderly woman who passed away. Her daughter donated it to the shop. It would’ve been at least $500 in New Jersey and a lot more if it crossed the Hudson to go up for sale at a Manhattan secondhand store.

I have had nearly thirty addresses in my 43 years, and I know that eventually in every new town you stop doing the newcomer’s math of “X would’ve cost Y back when I lived in Z.” I am not there yet. Give me a couple months.

There’s the wood box a nice man affixed to one of the AC units yesterday, because the wind was whipping through it so hard for hours that I felt as if I were living inside the world’s coldest, loudest tea kettle. I offered cold brew, a leftover preference from living in Los Angeles (the first time), but he prefers his coffee hot. I tipped him $10 and wished I had more.

My writing corner is messy for this place, but in the context of many previous abodes, it would be considered rather tidy - by whom? By my former self, I suppose. The one who drank, who scrabbled for affection from distant people until her fingertips bled, who thought a career would save her soul or at least fill the hole where it should be.

Yesterday, the final things were removed from my apartment in Brooklyn. It feels more final than the first two final times, but what do I know?

Today, an email told me a subway train derailed back home, or back there. That’s unusual enough, but this was the second time in a week. Today it was a northbound F in Coney Island. No one was hurt.

Eleven years in that town, I thought, and I never did make it to the Mermaid Parade.

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