No One’s Mother

I spend several hours on most days staring at Lake Michigan. This has gone on for nearly a year. It is very big, and I have the stupid good fortune of unobstructed views of it from my rental apartment in The Windy City, City of the Big Shoulders, Chi-town, The Second City, Mud City, City in a Garden, The City That Works.

If I’m at home and I’m writing, or eating, or texting, or meditating with my eyes open, or tidying up, Lake Michigan is there too. It’s always in the foreground, or the background, of my view — sometimes partially obscured behind my phone or laptop screen, a book, or a set of window blinds; sometimes seen in all its unpolished, wild beauty — as wild as it can be when regularly patrolled, landscaped, studied, visited, and hemmed in by 18 miles of the lovely Lakefront Trail, which runs from Ardmore Ave. in Rogers Park to 71st St. at the South Shore Cultural Center.

It’s dark now — it’s dark around 5 p.m. these days, and it’ll be darker earlier soon — so I can’t see the lake as I sit here, typing away in my living room. It’s not really “my” living room, as I don’t own this place, and even if I did, would a space inside a tall building really be “mine,” with a mortgage from a bank and a ceiling that’s really somebody else’s floor, and a floor that’s really somebody else’s ceiling? It depends, I suppose, on how one defines “mine.”