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On the Water

Robyn Michaels

    When I was a teenager, my parents bought a house on a lake. Well, it wasn’t exactly a lake. It was a pond. Actually, it was really a dredged out swamp, a several acre pond artificially created. This was in the 1960s.
    The house on the lake/pond was large: about 3000 square feet. We were a family of four kids, so it was more than enough room for us to not be in each other’s ways. It was a lovely house, sort of ‘H’ shaped. Kitchen/den wing, large living room (which we never used, of course. In fact, my mother had a grand piano in the room for about 10 years, to take up space) in the middle, and the ‘private’ bedrooms in the other wing. We didn’t have a basement, but a lower level with a wall of sliding doors which opened out to a small patio. Because of this, there was a lot of natural light in the lower level as well as on the main floor, which also had sliding glass doors on the water side as well as at the entrance of the house.
    The problem was, particularly in the spring, the lake/pond would rise. Because they didn’t want to take care of a large backyard (we had a side yard), my parents had it chopped off, and the house was only about 20 feet from the water. So, when the lake/pond overflowed, it seeped into the house. Not only that, after we had been in the house about two years, my father discovered a wall was seeping, due to a natural spring. He paid for water proofing, but it was never totally dry; it was dank.
    I thought of the house as home, but I was never happy there. I was a teenager with teenage angst and genuine issues. It wasn’t until I was in my 40s that I discovered I had Asperger’s, and depression wasn’t a matter of attitude, but neurology. Also, the kids at my neighborhood school were snotty. I guess they got the idea from their parents that because we lived on a lake, we were rich.
    When I moved out, at age 18, I went up to Milwaukee, because my boyfriend was in school there. We lived about half a mile from Lake Michigan, and walked there often. When we moved back to Chicago, we also lived close to Lake Michigan. We lived on the west edge Edgewater a mile from the lake. Then, we moved to a flat on the southern edge of Uptown, into a five room place about a quarter mile from the lake. Then, we moved into Lakeview, into another five room place, but because of Lincoln Park, we were now almost a mile from the lake again. Then, we bought a small house, a two flat, with a footprint of only about 400 square feet (if we had even that much space), a balloon frame house barely covered with tar paper....a little over a mile from the lake in a different direction. By this time we were married. We had been together eight years. Both sets of parents wanted us to be married instead of living together, and I wanted to build equity, even though I was hardly a capitalist. Getting married did us in. We were divorced three years later.
    I lived in that house because it was big enough for me, but I never really liked it. It had space heat, which is no longer allowed in the city. I did have the building insulated, which made a huge difference in the winter, and it had a fenced yard for the dogs, but the house was small and dark.
    One day, about 10 years after the divorce, after having been in Kenya for eight weeks over the summer (where I got to Lake Naivasha and the Indian Ocean), I came home to dozens of phone calls from real estate agents. My house had gone up five times in value! Who would have thought? I had the house sold in a week, which I didn’t expect, and moved up to Rogers Park, where, at the time, you could get ten times the space in a brick building for less than what I sold the wood house for. And—bonus—only three blocks from the lake!
    Watching water is soothing. I am less than a quarter mile from Lake Michigan. Even though the residential area is considered high density, being so close to the lake makes me feel not closed in.
    The only time I didn’t live close to open water was when I lived in Malawi, during my Peace Corps days. All the volunteers tried to get to Lake Malawi on their days off. For me, I felt I would spend too much time to travel there and back to enjoy it, and what was I to do there? Join the party and get drunk with other volunteers? It didn’t appeal to me. When asked why I didn’t want to go, I told them I lived close to the lake in the USA. Lake Malawi held no appeal to me. It was warm, and not particularly clean.
    I know people dream about having a home right on the water. My cousins owned a huge mansion in Union Pier, Michigan, right on Lake Michigan. It’s a great piece of property, on a bluff, and it was over seven stories down to the beach. That meant, also, it was seven stories back up to the house. It was better to sit in a lawn chair in the yard and just look at the water.
    My cousins on that side of the lake are real estate agents, and there’s a premium for living right on the water. My parents were relatively lucky. The lake/pond they lived on was slow moving water. People who live that close to the water on Lake Michigan found their homes affected by erosion. I always wondered how they managed to get insurance.
    I realize that I am lucky to have always lived near water. It’s reassuring. I also realize that having a water view adds often 5-20% value to a home. We need the reassurance of being near water. This is the reason I don’t move to a home in a desert.
    Also, I don’t maintain an aquarium now, but my father raised salt water fish and invertebrates for a time, and I had several tanks of fresh water fish: so soothing to watch.
    These days, more people are addressing mental health, Being able to be near water should not be discounted. Watching water, listening to waves, seeing our fellow creatures thrive in and around water should help us soothe ourselves. We all need water. If you are going through some turmoil, consider getting to water.

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