LABOR DAY

                                                          

Something happens after Labor Day in the lake country of central Minnesota. It’s the same feeling you got way back then, when you’ve had a grand party and the last guest had left and you and her sat on the couch, amid the spoils, all talked out, knowing the party was over. You just patted her hand and give her a small forced smile, like it was fun while it lasted. But instead of a cushy couch, today it’s an old weathered dock your sitting on, with a pair of discarded flippers and a broken plastic bucket impaled on one of the rusty pipes, hanging limply over the edge. An old fishing boat is still tied to the dock; it’s bow pointing upward and its rainwater-flooded stern barely peeking above the water line. A empty Styrofoam container, with the words, “Small leeches” on the cover floats in the water inside the boat, along with a cracked red seat cushion and a Snicker’s wrapper.

There was a fog over the lake that long ago Labor Day morning of which I write, shrouding the still waters like a wet blanket. The cool September air was bumping up against the still warmer lake waters. A bass surfaced long enough to take a water bug and then headed back down into the safety of the lily pads. A ring of small waves, evidence of the hungry fish coming and going, spread outward and finally dissipated and the lake was calm once more. From somewhere across the lake a boat motor coughed to life as an early morning fisherman went out to wet a line. It had been only a few weeks before that on a quiet summer evening when I had sat here at dusk with my arm around my wide-eyed ten-year-old grandson and told him about “Old Jingles,” the monster Northern Pike who prowls these shorelines. “At night he raises his head out of the water,” I said “and he shakes his jaw filled with rusty lures and broken fishing lines from battles he’s fought, hence the name, “Old Jingles.” The boy knew grandpa was spoofing but he just smiled politely.

It was always Memorial Day when it all began. The trees were just getting their new leaves and the lake was clear and deprived of weeds. It was foggy those mornings too but it was cold water and warm air that was the culprit this time. A pair of proud geese with ten little goslings bobbing in their wake had swum by the dock that morning. The lake was alive with fisherman trolling the shorelines in fancy boats. Screen doors banged as excited kids ran in and out of the houses. Someone was frying bacon and the coffee was rich, black and hot and the whole summer was lying ahead. It was summer at the lake and the fun was only beginning. We had a new paddleboat that year and Grandma fell in the lake the first time she tried it but she was an old hand at it now. The grandkids wanted grandpa to get a bigger motor because the pontoon didn’t pull them fast enough on the tube but he knew that all too soon they would tire of it and he’d be stuck with a gas hog that won’t troll down.

But that was then, and then is now and it was the midpoint of the summer-- the 4th of July this year- that I remembered watching the fireworks in town, from the dock all alone. This year there were few visitors or little kids and a lot of empty weekends for the old man at the lake. The flowers came and went, and all those toys I bought sat unused. The weeks peeled away and the trip from Memorial Day to Labor day was closing fast-- and now, here I am and where is all that jingling coming from?