Greetings from Green Lake

To you, just arrived at camp,

Welcome to the Storm Post Office. This letter comes from Green Lake in 1990, looking back on a few summers in the seventies. The envelope is forest green, lettered in the hand-painted style of an old camp sign that smiles a little too warmly; between cream pines and a lake like glass, lavender fog is screenprinted with a faint eeriness; a rust-red video-return label is stuck in one corner, beside a tiny moth stamp.

Thoreau wrote beside another lake: “A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.” — Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)

Green Lake has an eye like that, and it remembers everyone who came for a summer. The stories here are a little strange and very tender, strange as a moth on a window screen. You are welcome. Read slowly, and write slowly.

The lamps are on, the door unlocked

Storm Post Office

1990 · Green Lake