The End of Summer

It is six-thirty in the evening of Labor Day and there is not much activity on the Lake: a few Jet-Skis and the occasional plodding platform boat. It has been an inauspicious Labor Day weekend, weather-wise, and rumor has it that last night's traditional fireworks were postponed due to the light rain until tonight, when I am sure the touring audience will have mostly returned to their roosts. And so the Summer of 2002 will officially end with something of a fizzle.

I can't remember a Labor Day weekend without a reasonably intense level of activity on the dock. Usually the problem has been to many bodies rather than too few. The grille going non-stop, people running up to the house to get the forgotten brownies or a sweater, toddlers too young to swim falling into the water causing momentary hysteria, mostly on the part of their parents. Then, as darkness descends and the air begins to cool, the sweatshirts are untied from the waists and put to good use. Spots are chosen with little ones on warming laps, wrapped in beach towels still damp from the afternoon swimming. Soon, as anticipation begins to cross over into exasperation, a shout goes up with the first sighting of the lead boat in the sailboat parade emerging from the northwest corner of the Lake out of view around the curving shoreline. It won't be long now.

The string of flare-illuminated sails will work its way the length of the Lake along the opposite shore and as they approach Sunset (so named not because the Sun sets there, but because it's where you can see the Sun set from over the opposite shore of the Lake, more or less) the fireworks salute will begin. And if the timing is right, as it almost always is, the Grande Finale will conclude just as the boat parade is passing on the near side, right in front of the dock, on its return passage to the Boat Club. By this time, the more than necessary, no, more than advisable crews of these rose-colored boats are more than sociable with their beer and gin and tonics, and we'll shout and wave back and forth and blow air horns and otherwise make fools of ourselves and them. This is our peculiar way of ending the summer at Harvey's Lake - a sort of "Bye, y'all! See you on Memorial Day!"

But not this summer. This summer the dreary Labor Day weekend has been made all the more so at Pole No. 46 because the proprietor has recently removed to the Lakeside Nursing Home for the next phase of his life, and we have all been reminded of ours. The moods around here have matched the grey skies - damp spirits and faces abound. It is not solely because of the sadness that accompanies the transition of a beloved father and grandfather, but because of the realization that the word "home" will soon and forever mean something else. And in the very realest sense, it will not mean this place.

We have tried to take some of it with us and have been of mostly good temper with each other as we decide what "things," what physical objects will mean most to us in our futile but understandable efforts to hang on to the past. We have tagged and traded and suggested and frowned and smiled, even laughed as we sorted the wheat from the chaff. But no one of us would suggest that it has been anything but difficult - each for our own reasons.

For myself, I am almost pleased to observe that is seems to have been more difficult for the next generation than ours. We, however, understand the logic of it all. They have come to understand that you can't, after all, put a tag on the feeling of the sunshine as it warms you after a swim or the noise of the youngest member of the family as he careens around the racecourse of the kitchen or the smell of the lilacs or the fear of the third floor of this great old house. This place where we all grew up to varying degrees has some endearing oddities, like the sundial about to topple over and the little girl sitting next to the stone Japanese lantern and the ways the geraniums and roses seem to have minds of their own and the way the sunlight plays off the side of the barn and the bronze swan that's not a swan in front of the ice house. Perhaps the lesson for them is that you cannot take away in a car the things that mean most - and this is a valuable lesson. I hope they understand that to build the asset portfolio of happiness comes from having the courage and the energy to pursue it. Find your sunshine and your crazy geraniums wherever you may, but you won't find them if you don't go looking. Look on your pictures and your furniture that came from Harvey's Lake and Grammy's pins and rings and dinner plates and Gramps's books and thistles and pocket watches and remember. But then get yourselves up and go discover your own - create your own new beginnings, make your own fireworks, find your own boat parades. Invite me to see them, because I will be missing them and looking for my own.

Be of good cheer and... teach your children well.