As I walked alone around the lake one early morning in late September the water was still and the air was cooling with summer’s retreat. I was preoccupied, thinking how much the lake has been part of the fabric of my life for so many years and yet how distant I felt from it over the summer months as the triathletes moved in with their neoprene and gadgetry. Out of the quiet, a moorhen called, a sound so pristine and plaintive, it seemed to be echoing my thoughts, carrying them across the water to rebound off the banks, the trees, the reed beds. Like Echo, at times I’d felt deprived of speech (my way of articulating an attachment to place), apart from the ability to repeat the last words of another. Do I belong? A question that informed this song for October at the lake.

The Turning