Theme week 6, Place

My Lake

My lake. It’s been my lake since I was ten years old. Then it was a wild place with three tents for the seven wild children and the two parents brave enough to take them to a place with no road and no people.
I vividly remember the first time we made the trip to the side of the lake we had only viewed from the other shore. A Mom two months away from birthing number seven. A Dad unafraid to take six small children and a pregnant wife into uncharted territory. A hot walk around the shore and through a brook when the family got lost trying to find a dry way around. Dad at one point sat us all down under a tree while he went on without us to see if we were anywhere near our own three hundred feet of shoreline on our lake. I didn’t mind taking my turn carrying a younger brother. It was an exciting adventure.
Then, we were at the shore. All of us stripping off what clothes we didn’t need and walking into that water. The coldest, clearest water I have ever felt or seen. The sun shining down through the water to the rocks. I didn’t know it was not normal to be able to see through twenty feet of water to the rocks below.
The adventure just got better as the summer went on. We came back later with supplies brought over by boat. We put up the three tents. One for the boys, one for the girls and one for the parents. My Dad built a road that was semi-assessable if you had a four wheel drive. When that last baby girl was born before the summer was over, they made a hammock out of a clothes basket covered in cheese cloth to keep the mosquitoes from carrying her away and hung it in a tree. I’m happy to say she did get to go in a tent at night, but I wonder now what Child Protective Services would have thought of the whole deal. That summer we helped Dad build the camp on the weekends. We passed boards and pounded nails. During that summer and for many summers after we owned that shoreline. There were no other camps near us until years later. We made pathways up and down the shoreline with our little bare feet. We found where the big high bush blueberries were. An especially big pine tree became my special place. I would sit for hours with a book, my back to my tree, the lake stretching out in front of me. One summer I buried a bag of lemon drops under the tree roots so I had my little stash of sustenance while I read. We swam with the loons. One of the most magical memories of my life was swimming underwater with a loon streaking underwater beside me. At night I would lie on my back on the mossy bank and watch the stars. I could picture how it must have looked when it was populated with the Native Americans. (The Indians to me then.) How their campfires would reflect off this very water. How they might have picked blueberries off these same bushes.
Gradually other lots sold and we had to narrow down our ownership. That was alright. We were older and made many friends as others built their camps.
I now own my own one hundred feet of shoreline. There is a cute little bridge over the brook. The four-wheel drive road in now just a path. The lake is still the clearest lake I’ve ever seen. It’s still the coldest, spring fed water that the hottest days of August can‘t warm up. Like sitting in a hot fudge sundae.
It wasn’t bad when I had to share my shoreline with other camps every one hundred feet, but now the houses are going up. Big view-changing houses. With street lights in the front and in the back drowning out the stars. Street lights shining down on the aluminum docks. They’ve cut down trees on the little camp road to widen the way for the v-plow so people can live there all winter.
Oh, I do hate change. I’ll hang onto my little brown camp while houses go up around me for as long as I can. I’ll fight for my old, heavy, wooden dock beyond the point where it’s too heavy for my husband to deal with. I fought with people about the bug zappers that killed good bugs and made that annoying zt,zt,zt noise. My new crusade might have to be those damned streets lights.