Closing Up

I played hooky this afternoon, knowing that tonight I would pull together a mailing and be up late. I went out to the lake to close up camp with the dogs.

I hadn't been there in a while. The season had changed, and it was colder inside than outside. Even though there was gorgeous sun it was in the process of disappearing over the hill when I arrived around 1:00.

I cleaned out the fridge, pleased that I had done a good job of getting rid of things earlier in the fall. There was still a bag of garbage and things that needed emptying, like cider, that were past their due dates. But all in all it was easy. Not like in the old days when I would dig at the ice in the freezer for a day.

We had had a marvelous summer there. For the first time since we renovated it in 2004 we had been able to stay there consistently. We opened in May and here it was mid-November.

After I was done - the electricity turned off, the refrigerator doors propped open with towels, the garbage and recyclables hauled up to the car - we took a walk down the front by the lake. We moseyed past the camps until I realized that there was enough beach in front of the seawalls to walk on and jumped down.

I remembered walking the length of the lake - almost 5 miles probably (this is Otisco) - with my son and two of his friends when they were little. We just started and kept on, fascinated by the deserted camps and our ability to walk on the shoreline. At the south end we called back to camp to get a ride. The kids were tired that night!

Today my feet and the dogs' crunched dried zebra mussels, something we didn't have back then. They've invaded the lakes, making them cleaner but deadly on the feet. Shoes are necessary in some spots in the summer., but harmless now.

Done with our short walk we went back up to camp and left, but found once we were on the road that the propane truck was ahead of us filling tanks. Several people now live on the road year-round, whole families have been raised there.

Not for me. I like the openings in the spring and the closings in the fall.