Sixty Summers

A year has passed since I even opened my blog, let alone considered writing and posting any words, but I have been spending most of the last five weeks alone, blessed to be at my family’s summer home and leaving real life behind.

Today, however, is the last day of this interlude, this interruption from the worries and concerns of daily life. Tomorrow, I go home to New Jersey and leave New Hampshire behind, perhaps for another year.

I realize today, however, that this is my sixtieth summer on Lake Winnipesaukee - more or less. As I am a summer baby, I was probably not here that first summer. Still, there was always the chance that I might have been. And, to be fair, there were summers when we did not come - the year my youngest brother was born and perhaps a couple of years after college and grad school when the house stood empty as I do not believe my parents made the trek here during those years either.

However, since 1987 or so, I have been coming here each summer. With family. With friends. Alone. With a gang. I think the trips would have died quietly and the property sold had I not started coming again, first in law school for a weekend and then for a week with my husband.  We came both quietly and loudly and calmly and crazily. It has all been good. I tell myself every single day that I am truly the luckiest person in the world and I never fail to express gratitude for whatever fate brought me to this life.



But I digress. Words are easier to find when you are on a porch with waves quietly lapping at the shore, with boats humming by, with ducks announcing their presence and with children laughing in a neighbor’s yard. For sixty summers, more or less, I have watched as this spot changes and, truth be told, stays exactly the same.

Of course, more and more grandiose houses have inundated the shoreline and, therefore, more and louder boats cross my view. There are fewer cottages and more mansions, none of which fit in with historic norms. Restaurants have come and gone. Mini golf, once a staple, is harder to find and harder to afford.  The few water parks have disappeared. Parking has become troublesome. There are supermarkets, thank goodness, when once there were none.

But some things have not changed and I hope they never do. The sheer volume of sky takes my breath away no matter how long I am sitting, staring at it. Clouds here seem larger and whiter and cleaner than they do at home where trees, ironically, obscure the view. The temperature is rarely high although there were a couple of wicked days this summer which made be wish, briefly, for air conditioning. The mornings are truly golden with a clear, sharp breeze crossing my bed as the sun comes up - usually around 5am, but getting later as the summer draws to a close.

It is that moment that I will miss the most, the first awareness of another day at the lake, the first light, the first breathe of a new day. It is then that my heart fills with gratitude that another day has dawned, that there is the possibility of a 61st summer at the lake. After all, anything can happen to derail a dream.

As I sit on this porch, I mourn the passing of these five weeks, of this summer, gone in the blink of an eye - again. But I refuse to think about that, not on this crisp, clear lake morning in my paradise, my happy place, my heaven on earth.

Sunset on the Broads of Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire

Turn Back! Beware! It's Halloween!!!!!

There is nothing funny about Halloween. This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world. -- Jean Baudrillard 

It is just after 3:00pm on Halloween. I have already had four groups of children knocking at my door, demanding candy. Surprisingly, they were not little ones, but tween girls in fun and creative costumes or middle school boys dressed as creatures I do not recognize. I have yet to see a single little SpiderMan or Elsa or Lion King or Olaf. But it is early and it is Saturday and I expect there will be many, many more to come.

Even though I have no children at home, no Halloween parades to march in and a desperate need to avoid candy, I love Halloween. It is, without a fraction of a doubt, the best holiday each year. 

Why? Easy. It is a holiday without obligations. No family visits. No dinners to plan and prepare. I would say no decorations, but despite my lack of children, I still decorate for Halloween. I still buy and carve a pumpkin each year. 

I still put out skeletons and headstones and police tape and witches and ghosts.

   

I love this day and night because it brings children that are not mine to my door. They are all cute and funny and sweet and charming and oh so innocent, no matter the age, no matter the costume. I love seeing these children because they remind me of the boys I once lead by the hand to neighbors' homes. Laster, I sent them out in gangs with neighborhood children and one parent or another. Finally, and sadly, I let them out in the world to terrorize a neighborhood other than my own with friends I barely knew and certainly could not recognize.

My oldest missed his last opportunity to trick-or-treat as a high school senior (yeah, they do that around here) due to a freak October storm we called Hallsnoween. That was hugely disappointing for everyone.

The next Halloween was sacrificed due to the horrors of Superstorm Sandy. October 31st passed in a blur of darkness and fallen trees and cold nights. Only the smallest of the small missed going out that year.

Christmases and Thanksgivings and Independence Days all blur together as the years pass, but because costumes change, each Halloween sticks in my mind. Blond wigs, witch hats, parades at my grandparents' house with my innumerable cousins, and taking my much younger brother, dressed as SuperMan, around my childhood neighborhood are days and moments I shall never forget. I have little curled 3x3-inch Kodak prints with white borders of those events, stuck in a scrapbook, preserved forever. 

The clearest memory of all, though, is the year I was my hero, Mary Poppins, carpet bag and all. Sears had great costumes in those days. They were real clothes, not the flimsy costumes they make now with string ties in the back. I had that carpet bag for years. I wish I had it still and have no idea of its fate. My parents forgot to take pictures that year. Making the memory was more important than preserving the moment. As it should be.

I got a rock. -- Charlie Brown (Charles Schultz)