The Lake House

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You drive out of Hancock, across the bridge, across the Delaware, from New York State into Pennsylvania. We were together soon after his birthday, Marco and I and he was seventy-four years old. I called him my younger brother. He was pre-old. Japanese say seventy-five is old. But before “old” comes “pre-old”, sixty-five to seventy-five and after that you’re old and Marco was just seventy-four years old. 


We were together in the Subaru speeding along the northeastern country roads in  Pennsylvania in early spring and the buds were blushing and coming now and the forsythia was blazing and the daffodils too and the Saskatoons on the forest edge were blooming white flower clusters in the crisp shadows. But it was  cold, a gray day with a twinkle of ice in the air and the new green fields were dusted fairy white.


Sometimes when I drive through these old hills I think about Andrew Wyeth’s haunting painting of Christina, the crippled young woman in the yellow grass field looking up the rise towards a tall solitary house in the distance with one yellow light burning. She leans her weight on one arm and since she cannot walk, she drags herself through the world. It was a true story and it is a desolate and lonely painting from around these parts but somehow glorious like the roads we are driving today with straight-backed, humble, clapboard  farm houses and cottages and red barns and the rolling countryside of northeastern Pennsylvania.  


There are communities up here hidden in the conifers and curves and people congregate around lakes and ponds, hideaways from the city. And some retire up here because there is plenty of water and soil to grow food and some peace and quiet. And wood stoves. 


Today is 4/20, the twentieth of April a day to celebrate, commemorate the herbal magic of Cannabis, the marijuana plant; green weed, ganja, a spiff.  


“Rastafari”! 


It's a culture, world wide and even a religion. 


“Rastafari”. 


Legal and illegal it unites and excites connections, opens portals, avenues and streams, synapses and neural pathways to other worlds. As they say. And therefore it should be celebrated and so it was. 


We parked the Subaru beside an old Hemlock tree on the edge of the driveway and a German Shepherd, tongue lolling, eyes smiling, welcomed us inside. It was a cozy wooden country lake cottage with a wooden deck and steps down over rocks to the lakeshore. There were houses all around, most of them summer homes and the lake must have been one-hundred acres. It was one of those postcard lake communities common up her hidden on the edge of the Catskills and the Poconos and the Endless Mountains. 


There were silhouettes in the corridor, down past the kitchen then into the front room where the fire glowed red and the lake was silver and flickers of snow floated down and as we went inside we could see it all  through the panoramic widows.


There was pot luck food on a table and bottles of home made fruit wine; blueberry, peach, apple and pear and a small plate of olives and hot green peppers and hummus sprinkled crimson with paprika, that shone with olive oil, and black olives, capers and parsley. But the highlight was the tandoori style chicken with a subtle mix of authenticity and spices that warmed the mouth  and soul and filled me with exotic memories  and possibilities. Someone pointed to a man in a drab green shirt and faux military cap leaning against the wall and he looked a bit like Ben Kingsley and he nodded and I nodded back. “That’s the tandoori cook.”


I approached to commend him and said I thought I tasted the sweetness of  tamarind and he smiled. Turned out he was a neural scientist with a post-doctorate and was working on a novel about slavery and identity in Africa and America so I knew I was in deep water and I looked at this quietly spoken man with renewed respect but tried not show it too much. I suppose I just shrugged and looked down and said, “Hmmm”. 


By the end of the 4/20 affair he and I had become Commonwealth buddies for he was born in East Africa and educated in the U.K. had traveled around the world more than two dozen times because he ended up working for a pharmaceutical company. “Hmmmm” I said again and put my arm around his shoulder noting that Mahatma Gandhi had worked as a lawyer representing Indian workers in South Africa because now I felt like I was in the movie Gandhi because he looked so much like Ben Kingsley up close and his eyes flashed green and yellow. 


“I was a patrol officer in Papua New Guinea for seven years”, I offered because we may as well get the colonial era behind us. “You know what that means”, I said and images of the Raj and the Black Hole of Calcutta and the British East India Company and the fight for Indian independence flashed through my mind and I was sorry I said that. But he absorbed the remark with wry humor.


And then I met his wife. She was sitting nestled in the corner of the couch, nestled there like she was beside the coal fireplace back in Ireland where she was born. I sat beside her and introduced myself and offered how much I’d enjoyed her husband’s food and her blue eyes smiled and she said: 


“He does all the cooking”.


She was born Catholic and lived in a Protestant neighborhood. “And I got bullied a lot, bashed up. It was really bad for us,” and she looked down at her hands clasped in her lap as she curled on the couch beside the fire, “and I never went back.”


“The Troubles” she said and she looked back at me to see if I understood and I broke into the IRA anthem sung by Tommy Markham and the Clancy Brothers: 


“Oh we’re of to Dublin

In the green, in the green,

Our helmets a glittering in the sun.

Where the bayonets flash

And the rifles crack
To the rattle of the Thomson Gun.”


And she smiled.


I remember the blood and bone struggles and the Troubles in Ireland. They were reported every morning in Australia on the ABC and we followed the hunger strikes, the death of Bobby Sands. We felt the struggle in Australia too, the shadow of brutish oppression of the British Crown in the past, the cruelty that lasted until federation and independence in Australian in 1901, the year my Father was born. The Irish are celebrated in Australia because they are in the roots of the nation’s proud convict past.


And then a man unpacked a small electric guitar with five strings and played a heavy bass note and he beat it and bent it and pounded out a fractured kind of rhythm and a melody like out of Lord of the Rings and then this quiet fellow  who’d been standing alone in the corridor was now sitting across from the bass unpacking his saxophone: “New one he said, just got it”. He turned out to have studied at Berklee College of Music and he cleaned the reeds and blew some notes and eased in behind the beat nice and smooth and the room turned to listen.


I noticed a woman swaying and moving with the beat, syncopating and she noticed me watching and she smiled and I looked more closely now because I felt the pinch of arrows in my heart. And then I looked away because there is a time and a season for everything and this was not the time.


By now everyone was pretty high because there were varieties of edibles and smokables and the clock ticked and oscillated closer to 4/20 and  the excitement grew and the smoke thickened. It was like a New Year countdown in Times Square. Someone was pouring Willies, Willy Nelson’s Cannabis  infused liquor with around twenty percent THC, which was delicious citrusy with a sweet green cannabis aftertaste.


By then the tandoori chicken was gone though I noticed a couple of remaining slices of the greasy pork belly with golden crackling remained and I took one between my fingers.


_____


“Did you hear they locked Trump out of the Situation Room”, I said to Marco as we drove home in the dusk. “I read it on Facebook”. But it turned out to be true. 


I thought I’d just add that to the story because as well as the extraordinary tandoori chicken and fellowship on 4/20, 2026, the President of the United States was locked out of the Situation Room and The Epstein Class still pulled the strings and now the sun was gone and it was dark.






©042226 Andrew Leslie Phillips





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