GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN

                                              

It seems like only yesterday when Pat and I made our way home from Arizona to Minnesota for the summer months. “It’s always good to be home again,” we said at the time but now after three years of wintering down south in the same place, the same will be said when winter comes again and we head back to Maricopa. Whichever place we are at. It’s now home away from home.

When we arrived in Minnesota the trees were still bare and remnants of last winters ice and snow still lurked in the shadows. But in the roadside ditches and sunny hillsides, green grass was showing and down by the garden the rhubarb was emerging, poking its knurly red heads out of the black soil. The ice on the lake was all gray and cracked, days away from reverting back to a liquid and freeing the lake from winter’s icy cover. Yes, we were going to have another blessed summer. We had a carefully planed litany of events choreographed for our Minnesota summer we planed on living out on those summer days. There were weddings, meetings with old friends, concerts in the park and yes even unexpected funerals. Days basking in the sun at the beaches or rocking in the boat with a fishing rod in hand and nights with the grandkids, cuddled around a campfire. There were evenings on the deck watching the sun go down across the lake as it has done so many times before, only to welcome you the next morning, peeking over the eastern horizon.

Now as I write its late September and that summer we were so looking forward too is fast fading away. Somewhere in the back of my mind I hear Pete Seeger singing, “Where have all the flowers gone, long time passing. Where have all the flowers gone, long time ago.” Memorial Day, the fourth of July, the State Fair and Labor Day are in the past now too and so now we wait for Autumn. The days are growing shorter, and summer 2019 is on its way into history.

I try to think of all of the things I wanted to accomplish this summer and yes some of them got done and some of them were relegated to another time and another day, knowing full well at my age that another day and time is tenuous at best. Last spring I tore out another coupon from that book of life we all live with for one more summer and cashed it in. It’s a book that you can’t look ahead in, only back at and its pages, at least for me are becoming fewer and fewer. Some people can simply ignore the passing of life but that way of procrastinating can leave you with regrets someday that you didn’t do the things you wanted to do, when you could and life is so fickle it can all change in a hurry.  I think when all is said and done, it will be the summers of my life that will be remembered as the fondest and maybe that’s why we follow the sun in the winter months, looking for that elusive eternal summer. Winter up north is a time of hardship for many with it’s cold dark nights, snow and ice and we feel blessed to escape its icy blast. Life goes on for those who can’t escape it and I hope that their days in the sun will come too. But as much as you look forward to leaving in the fall you also looking forward to returning in the spring, to a place where our creator did some of his best work and I’m betting it was a warm spring day when that idea struck him.

A NEW PHONE

So I upgraded to a new phone yesterday. My old one was failing and gee wiz it was five years old.  The new one is pretty much like the old one, except it does things the old one couldn’t do, that I will never use, or never understand; but hey I needed to do this and if you ask any of your tech savvy friends they will understand why.

I asked at the store if they had any good sales on the phone I wanted to buy and the sales person, bubbling over with glee said, “This is your lucky day. Its buy one get one free.’ I explained to him that I live by myself with a Labrador dog that has no thumbs so she can’t push the home button and really no one to call anyway because all of her doggy friends don’t have phones.  Yet.

Well anyway I kept my old phone case but unbeknown to me the hole in the back of the case for the camera to peak out of didn’t line up with the camera eye so my pictures were rather dark. I did figure it out eventually because I’m no dummy, so I’m proud of that. So I’m off to buy a new camera case. Maybe I should have got the free phone, so I could trade it for a new case. Oh well live and learn.

Sales and advertising get almost laughable some times and especially this buy one, get one free offers. There are certain items that you buy that rarely change or wear out, so having two of them just doesn’t make a lot of sense. I once bought an iron tool that was guaranteed for life and it was on a buy one get one free sale. When I asked the salesperson what I was supposed to do with the second one he said, “Give it away to a friend.” I asked, “How about you sell me one for half price and my friends can buy their own.” “No can do” he said.

Another ploy is offering things for 50% off. I went to my favorite grocery store that was offering T-bone steaks for half price. They were 7.95 a pound on sale ½ price. My Staples High School math puts that regular price at around 16 dollars per Lb. I didn’t buy and when I went back the following week they were 8.95 a pound not on sale. When I asked why they told me, “Different grade of meat.”

Another favorite trick is to shame you into buying things, just because everything has a shelf life you know. Talk to a mattress salesman and tell him your mattress is 9 years old and he will tell you, “You are playing with fire my friend. That mattress is so full of bugs and sloughed off skin cells, it just might be labeled hazardous waste. Your lucky it hasn’t walked right out the door a long time ago.” No it doesn’t

matter that you had it covered with a bed cover all those years, those critters will find a way to get in there. There just might be a separate disposable fee for something like that. He heard most of them are being sent to a super fund sight out in the Mohave Desert and it ain’t cheap but just for today buy one mattress and get another free and I’ll get rid of your old one somehow. By the way that free mattress will cost three hundred dollars for delivery.                         See you next week readers

ONE MORE SUMMER

                                               

It was Saturday night of Labor Day weekend and the last concert of the summer season in the park, in Crosslake. The evening started out warm and comfortable but as the sun dipped beneath the horizon a chill set in and many people folded their chairs and slipped away, even though the concert wasn’t over. For me it was an ominous warning that once again summer was retreating and colder weather is ahead. Oh, we might have an Indian summer yet. But it’s always been--  and at least for me, the last gasp of summer.

Labor day in Crosslake is the omega of the summer season. A time when the sounds of squeaky wheels reverberate across the lake as docks are pulled from the depths once more, to sit out the winter as silent sentinels on frozen shorelines waiting for spring to come back once more. Boats, water toys and pontoons are hidden away now under blue tarps or in dark garages and one by one the cabins are shuttered and abandoned. The town goes from bustling to a much slower pulse. Most of the planed summer’s activities have all been exhausted; the kids are back in school, the harvest is on; hunting season is right around the corner. The sign in the restaurant has been turned around 180 so it now says, “Seat yourself” and all around the many lake’s it is strangely quiet. Last summer I took a trip around the chain of lakes and marveled at the homes and cabins. I couldn’t help but think about all the memories that must have been made in those homes and all the friendships that were renewed this summer between families and neighbors, often around the beach or the fire pits over good food and drinks. God willing there will be another summer for a do over  for everybody next year but for now we must wait.

I have in my house a quiet place where all of the picture albums are displayed. There was a time when we developed our pictures and put them in a book that led to many books to page through on cold and lonely nights. Twenty years full of weekends and vacations at the lake. So many of the early pictures were of our grandbabies that now have babies of their own.  She was so religious about those picture albums when she was here but that’s old fashioned now as we store them in our phones or computers in somewhat of a private fashion. I often wonder if she had lived, would there have been more albums or would she have succumbed to the phone herself. There are pluses and minuses to this; the camera on the phone is always with you but for the most part, eventually the pictures are lost to the ages, never to be seen again and so those who do follow us and want to revisit our trip of happiness and tears called our life, you will have to be content with just the story.

But that is what life is all about isn’t it. You get married and settle down, raise a few kids, retire to the lake to enjoy the grandkids and then they too grow up and everybody scatters like dandelion seeds in the wind. Their world gets busier while yours gets quieter and those special times become fewer and fewer and soon there your are, all alone picking your way through those picture albums and smiling, sometimes through a tear or two while whispering to yourself, “Yes I remember that.”