Member-only story
A Longing For Paradise
Seeking renewal at the lake
Walking along the shore of the lake, Amanda was saddened to see the deteriorating state of the area. She had been walking the shore of this lake for most of her life and was a witness to the slow degradation of this little environment.
When she was young it seemed like a pristine paradise. There was only a handful of buildings along the shoreline. There were so many more trees and birds. Now, the gulls were still there, in fact there seemed to be more, but most of the other birds were gone.
It used to be a rare thing to see any trash by the lake in the past but now there was trash strewn everywhere. The edge of the water where it lapped up on the sand was now a multi-colored line of trash. The water used to only wash driftwood ashore but now it was mostly plastic and bottles and aluminum cans and countless cigarette butts and a strange brownish foam.
Amanda remembered hearing only the birds and the water lapping the beach but now the prominent sounds were traffic, distant boomboxes playing rap music and the hammering and grinding sounds of construction.
She wanted to go back to the lake shore of her past. It had been her refuge from the incessant grindings of human life; the place she went to relax and refresh and meditate and commune with nature and the…
