One year, when I was
about thirteen or fourteen, on the evening before we were to leave to return to
Connecticut from Maine at the end of the summer, as we ate our last camp supper
on the screened porch, my mother looked out at the lake and said, in an almost
defiant tone, “Some year, I’m going to sit
right here and watch the leaves turn color.”
I was a
teenager—self-absorbed, unsympathetic, dismissive. I wasn’t thrilled about
leaving camp, either, but hey—at least I’d get to see my friends, and school
might not be too bad this year, and there would probably be some boy on whom to
develop an unrequited crush. It was the end of the summer, not the end of the
world.
A year or two later, as
we were packing up to leave again at the end of another summer, my mother
sighed. “This year was going to be the year when I would get to sit right here and watch the leaves turn
color.” It must have been 1974, the year my father would have turned 62,
the year he would have planned to retire and move back to Maine. They would
have stayed on at camp as long as they wanted to that fall—sitting right there,
watching the leaves turn color—then relocated for the winter to the snug little
year-round home “on a hill in Bethel” that they had always talked about.
Fate, in the form of
unexpected widowhood, then my (equally unexpected) arrival, intervened. My
mother eventually did retire to Bethel, in 1982, but I don’t think she ever
really did get to “sit right here and watch the leaves turn color.” She plunged
directly into a hectic retirement schedule that included volunteering, church
activities, bridge club, and babysitting (she was “Gramma Wight” to half the families
in Bethel), and by Labor Day it was time to get back to her house in town
before things fell completely apart without her.
Now that I live three
miles away from camp, I’ve been pushing back against the end of summer just a
little harder every year. Last year we moved home from camp on September 29th,
and we’ve already beaten that by over a week this year. Of course, we’ve had a
fire going in the woodstove almost steadily for several weeks, and we’ve
probably burned at least two cords of wood that should probably have been
earmarked for heating our “real” house during the “real” heating season. But
when you’re married to a logger, wood seems cheap and plentiful (it’s not,
really) and it doesn’t seem like such a big deal to heat a drafty, uninsulated
summer camp in order to squeeze a couple more weeks from the season. (Next
year, we’re thinking, with some insulation in the roof and walls, we could
target November first. In the more distant future, with new windows, and some
heat tape on the water line, could we make it to Thanksgiving?)
We’re planning to move
home this coming weekend—really! I know I’ve been saying that for the past two
or three weeks, but every day I see something—a sunset, a flock of noisy geese,
the full moon reflected in a lake that’s as still as a mirror—that makes me
think, if we had moved home yesterday, we’d have missed this. Life is so much
simpler here that it’s hard to think about leaving.
Besides, I’m doing it for
Mom…sitting right here, watching the sun set. And the moon shimmer on the water. And the leaves turn color.
