When I was nine years old, I lived on a lake a little farther north than this one, in a white house with a green door, with my mother and my father and my brother Walter and a cat named Pudding. That winter was the coldest winter anybody could remember. The snow came up over the windowsills, and my father had to dig a tunnel to the woodshed, and the milk froze solid in the bottle on the back step and pushed its paper cap right up like a little hat.

One night in January I woke up because I heard something.

It was the strangest sound I had ever heard. It went whoooom, low and deep, like somebody blowing across the top of the biggest bottle in the world. And then it went ping! ping! pyewww!, high and twangy, like somebody plucking a wire fence a mile long. And then whoooom again, right under the house, it seemed like. It went on and on.

I was scared. I will tell you the truth, Emma, I was very scared. I thought it was a monster. I thought it was a bear. I thought the whole world was cracking open. I got out of bed and went down the cold stairs in my stocking feet, and there was my father, sitting in the kitchen by the stove in his long johns, with a cup of coffee, and he was smiling.

"Do you hear that, Pearlie?" he said. "That's the lake singing."

*

He bundled me up in my snow pants and my coat and two scarves and his big wool mittens that came up to my elbows, and he put on his own coat and his cap with the ear flaps, and we went out the back door and down to the shore. The air was so cold it squeaked. The stars were so bright it looked like somebody had spilled sugar on a black tablecloth.

My father had fished that lake his whole life, and he had been out that very morning with his ice chisel, checking how thick the ice was, the way he did every morning all winter. It was thicker than my arm was long. So he took my hand, and we walked a little way out onto the ice, and we lay right down on our backs on the snow, side by side, and we listened.

And oh, Emma, it was the most wonderful sound. Whoooom. It came up right through my back, through my coat and my snow pants, into my bones, like the lake was humming. Ping! Pyewww! Ping-ping-ping! It ran away from us across the ice in every direction, far off into the dark, and then it came racing back. It sounded like whales. It sounded like the biggest guitar in the world. It sounded like the lake was talking to itself in a language nobody else knew.

"When it gets very, very cold," my father said, "the ice shrinks, just a little, and it cracks. And the crack runs for miles and miles, and the whole lake rings like a bell. There's nothing to be afraid of. The ice is just stretching."

"Like when you wake up in the morning?" I said.

"Just like that," he said. "Old lake's just stretching."

We lay there until my nose couldn't feel anything anymore, and then we went in, and my mother made cocoa and said we were both crazy, and my father winked at me. I went back to bed and I listened to the lake singing until I fell asleep. I was never scared of it again.

*

That was sixty-three years ago. My father has been gone a long time now. But every winter, on the very coldest nights, the lake out in front of my house still sings, and every time I hear it, I think of him lying on the ice beside me in his cap with the ear flaps.

And last January, when you stayed over for the long weekend, Emma, and you came padding into my room in the middle of the night because something was going whoooom, you remember what we did. We put on our coats and went out on the porch, and we listened to the lake sing together.

I hope someday you'll tell this to your own grandchildren. Tell them it really happened. Tell them the lake was just stretching.

The End