Something About Smith | A Perfect Autumn Lake Day (for a man and his best friend)

Lead photo Terry Turner | WRITER NICHOLAS REICH

Morning: Wake up exactly one hour later than usual. This helps with everything to follow. Make breakfast: richly spiced chai tea with a dollop of cream, poached eggs, red grapes perfectly in season, and homemade buttermilk biscuits (that you made yesterday) with pear preserves delivered last week from Betty around the slough (you can see through your living room French windows that life is stirring at her house, too). Let Eve, your dog, have a spoonful of softened butter with her kibble. You two can share this day. She understands luxury.

Walk with Eve down the patio stairs to water the herbs in raised beds. Here, in the smell of cedar mulch and rosemary, notice how the fog over the lake dances closer to the surface than during hotter months. Notice, too, that the fishing boat’s wake pushes leaves now shades of mustard, maroon, and ochre onto the sandstone beneath the dock bridge, Eve’s favorite place to paw at the fish. She will visit there momentarily. Before you sit down to read, take a shower. Only use products perfumed with vanilla.

Nicholas and Eve

Photographer Nicholas Reich

Early Day: Read. That’s all. As long as you can, but no longer than you want. Some Italian tale of love and adventure set in 1944, perhaps? Or maybe a crime thriller set in the Catskill Mountains? A story that will enrich the stillness of this Alabama lakeside life by sheer contrast.

Afternoon: Pack a peanut butter and blackberry jam sandwich and a small thermos filled with milk in your lunch pail. Eve has been pacing by the windows, looking out at the water, a rippled mirror in the southbound wind. She doesn’t understand your hours-long fascination with that book. Take her out on the pontoon as an apology. She will shake with excitement as soon as you lift the keys.

Eve

Photographer Nicholas Reich

In her lifejacket and windswept ears, Eve has a way of looking both regal and silly. Steer out across the deep water to the bluffs on the other side. You may permit yourself once there to think, but not too deeply, about how this valley might have looked before the lake was dammed. These thoughts are harder to think when the churning waters of summer traffic make it seem like this could only ever have been a lake, only ever the magnificent playground of July. Let Eve jump out at the island close by. Tie up in the soft sand and follow her into the trees. But don’t keep too close. Once she’s lost sight of you, she can play like some ancient, humanless dog in the hushed Southern woodland. Enjoy your sandwich while she runs.

Early Evening: This time, no shower. Instead, you will draw a bath in the clawfoot tub next to the third-floor, west-facing window. To finish watching the setting sun drift below the line of pine and hemlock across the open channel. Crack the window and listen to the silence, if you wish. The evening electric storms have subsided to the chill. Dunk your head under the water. Eve likes to bark at the bubbles you make.

Dinner is a barley risotto with bass filet (caught two days ago by Florence, an old friend and the best fisherwoman in Cullman County, who delivers to you by boat) scampied in butter, garlic, and lemon. Taste endlessly as you cook. This is not cooking to survive. With dinner, open the Sémillon you were saving for a special occasion. Its window of perfection has arrived. Pass small bites of buttery fish to Eve.

Night: End this day with fewer fireflies than a month before and a quieting of the cicadas. Someone down the water, some family, will light a fire and you will smell their hickory and hear them laughing. They, too, are finishing a good day. You will know, in exactly this moment, that there is no need at all for committing the details of this day to memory or recording them in your journal. This particular day, you’ve known all along, was always going to be a day beyond details. It is the cool calm of fall you can revisit year after year when the lake is not for sport but for living.

Now, sleep. Close yourself like moon-shy mimosa leaves over the faintest song of lapping wake and engine-purr (someone is nightriding). Autumn has settled on the lake. All is well.

BIO on Nicholas Reich – Growing up a short truck-bed ride from Smith Lake, Nick Reich spent his younger summers (and sometimes winters) splashing in the sloughs, leaping from the bluffs, poking catfish, and skipping bodily across those waters. He still visits often. Tough most of his time is now consumed studying for a PhD and editing at NASA, he still finds time to write fun stuff about his dog, Eve, at her request.

The Lakeside Life | Fall/Winter Issue | November 2019 QTR3-4 | VOL 2 ISS 3 | thelakesidelife.com