It’s a typical October day. Its not raining, but its dripping, Seattle style. It’s not cold but there is a chill in the air. The lake is deathly calm but drifting on the surface are hundreds of dead leaves blown in on yesterdays breezes and now they bob like little Sampans in an Oriental harbor. Already, last summer seems to be lost somewhere in the book of memories of days gone by. I’m glad I won’t be here to see the lake freeze over this year. It never was a high point for me but rather it was Mother Nature’s way of saying the seasons over; let’s just cap it off for now.
Once you retire and live at a lake the seasons are personified like the actors in a play, each season coming to its own conclusion. The curtain falls and rises again and then slowly one season ebbs into the next. Fall to winter never has the same anticipation as winter to spring but yet we must sit through all of the acts, or the play doesn’t make sense. The plants and animals now need to rest and so should we.
To the younger ones and the more hearty people that strap on the skis and pull out the fish houses, winter in the Midwest brings a whole new style of fun. But to the elderly it can be a forced hibernation and just because you walk like a duck on the ice and snow, it doesn’t mean you are one and if you were you would have left a long time ago to a place where the water stays liquid.
Oh how I remember those long winter nights of my childhood wrapped up like a cocoon in our attic bedroom as a kid. Nothing was between us and the outside weather but the roof boards and shingles. Nothing showed in our beds but the tops of our heads, the heavy covers muffling all the snores and snuffles. Outside the wind howled around the house and the window glass froze over with frost and the designs on the glass the frost made, seemed like Waterford Crystal. We could hear the crunch of the car tires as they pushed through the snow on the street below and only fifty feet away from our beds but couldn’t see the cars. The sound of the freight trains that rumbled through town a block away, echoed in that attic as if they were just outside. It was a cacophony of wind, steam whistles, and the steel wheels of boxcars clicking down the tracks and that rarely changed. The school building was always a welcome place for us kids because it was always warm there. Mom and dad wished for better times for us and we understood that they did the best that they could with what they had, but it sucked.
Yes, I have come a long way since that attic bedroom and so have my siblings. Kelly Clarkson sang, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” In a way, I’m not sure if it makes you any stronger but it does make you smarter and you vow that you will never shiver like that again but yet you have so much empathy for those who will. On the other hand my childhood isn’t on my list of regrets. It wasn’t easy but then building character isn’t always easy. I loved my family with all my heart and my parents loved all of us kids. You can at some point always buy a nice home and fancy things, if that’s what you want but you can’t buy a loving family.
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