Clay Woman Falls in Love With the Lake by Tashia Hart
Waabiganikwe stares through wide windowpanes, to the early morning, frigid sparkle of Gichii-Gammii but a stone’s throw behind her lakeside home.
The sight, a feast for her eyes, same as the way the clay she’s worked with the last thirty years nourishes her hands. Vessels formed from local earth line shelves along either side of the window, peppered with small objects found on the beach over the years.
Houses crowd along the shore, but the limited outdoor activity of her neighbors this time of year, comforts Waabiganikwe with a sense of solitude.
In the winter, hers is the only house with a maintained path to the water’s edge. Today, in addition to two new feet of snow in her yard, she can see on the beach several large blocks of ice.
The lakeshore is always shaping itself anew; rigid and slippery, hard with ice one minute; wide open the next, ejecting white steamy sea smoke a mile into the atmosphere. Girths of wood with wild tangles of root still in tack at the base, come forth to lodge themselves transitorily while loads of stone push into and out of Waabiganikwe’s cozy nook of land over the course of an afternoon.
A great thirst beckons Waabiganikwe’s sexagenarian vessel to be filled with the vital lap of the water’s edge.
Bundled from crown to tip of toe, she slowly but steadily shovels her way, taking it inch by inch, struggling to find a place to heft the heavy sticky mess atop the already four-foot walls of fluff.
While she works, she uncovers evidence of her everyday life of seasons past—a lost gardening glove here, a chunk of bagaan shell there.
After breaking for lunch, she reaches the shore to see the sun kissing the western horizon, biting its golden pink teeth into the variating firmness of translucent, liquid life.
She greets the waterside, her nose dripping, curls greasy under her fleece-lined hat. She removes her gloves and reaches into a pouch for a pinch of asemaa, which floats on the swirls between circular ice patches spinning in dance upon the water.
Her mission fulfilled, she inspects the beach. Just one block of murky ice a little larger than herself–if lying on her back—remains. She walks around it, fascinated by the fine sediment throughout making it impossible to see through.
On the top of the block, which is about thigh high, Waabaganikwe squints at… the cap… of a mushroom? Unsure, she licks her finger and gives it a rub, making a swirling motion, melting the ice a little around the top of the 2-inch-wide fleshy cap.
That’s odd.
It became warm and wriggled under her touch.
No stranger to foraging in the northland, Waabiganikwe bends down to see if she can sniff out the type of mushroom. Just the slightest aroma.
What is that?
The tiniest of tastes should be harmless, she thinks.
Her tongue probes the tip of the structure. She smacks her lips, allowing the flavor to permeate her senses. The taste is… distantly familiar.
The warmth of her flesh had melted the ice just a tad. To get to quite literally the bottom of this conundrum, she’d need to melt a whole lot more.
Besides a neglected and leaky hot water bottle at the bottom of a hall closet, Waabiganikwe can think of only one thing that has some heat.
She looks up and down the darkening beach. Satisfied with her privacy, she slides her insulated pants down just enough to reveal the soft warmth of her bottom.
She begins rubbing her butt on the ice.
After a short while, Waabiganikwe turns to see the mushroom has grown a touch in girth. In fact, she’s not so sure it’s a mushroom anymore.
She replaces her pants and peers into the interior of the ice block. It’s too muddied tell what’s inside. She walks around to a narrow end and gives a push. To her surprise, the ice moves forward.
That settles it.
A half hour later, Waabiganikwe slides the large chunk off the sled, through the back door, and into the sitting room.
She lights several candles and kicks off her pants. Before long, she’s gleefully bouncing upon the ice, losing track of time and space, as the melt sloshes beneath her.
She stops when she feels a new tickle from below.
“Oh dear.”
Another smaller protrusion has revealed itself two inches from the first, which is now more than just a cap.
She shrugs. If it’s not broke, don’t fix it.
Waabiganikwe finds her place upon the ice again. This time the warmth builds greater with the added tickle upon her rear.
The circular motion she makes is wild and rhythmic. In fact, the last thing that crosses Waabiganikwe’s mind before the world turns to light, is how she is like a piece of clay, eager to be shaped into form.
Candles dark, the ice now melted. Water, slowly spreading clay sediment across the floor.
Beyond the wide windowpanes, the clouds break, letting in the moon to shine on twenty toes intertwined on four limbs a slumber.
A whole day passes, and then another, before any movement is seen outside the house of Waabiganikwe.
Just before sunset on the third day, the back porch swing squeaks as two darkhaired figures cuddle in a blanket and admire the view of Gichii-Gammii.
An elder woman pushes her head through a break in the leafless but thick bush that separates the houses.
“Lovely, isn’t it?” The neighbor says.
The young dark-haired woman on the swing smiles and nods.
The neighbor persists, “I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Sandra.”
“I’m… Oshkiikwe, and this,” she motions to the handsomely dark-skinned man smiling contentedly next to her, “is Gichi-Gamii-Inini.”
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Anishinaabe Words: Waabiganikwe = Clay Woman; Gichii-Gammii = Lake Superior; bagaan = hazelnut; Oshkiikwe = New Woman; Gichi-Gamii-Inini = Lake Superior Man.
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Clay Woman Falls in Love With The Lake was inspired by my time living along the shore of Lake Superior. This story is currently a part of the Once Upon A Shore group exhibit at the MMAM Minnesota Marine Art Museum in Winona, MN through 2025. The exhibit is curated by Heid Erdrich and features work by Courtney M. Leonard, Cole Redhorse Taylor, Jonathan Thunder, and Minnesota’s Poet Laureate, Gwen Nell Westerman. Learn more about the exhibit: https://mmam.org/once-upon-a-shore