Packing Up

 

PACKING UP 

I started blogging just one year ago and have no regular pattern or topic, only what seems compelling to me at the moment.  Many of this year's blogs were short tributes to the 20 women in my book. A few like this one were journalistic, what is happening in my own life or in my own reflections or memories. The good thing about a blog is that no one needs to read it and anyone can.  I would love comments from  any of you who do enjoy sharing these ruminations, but that, too, is purely an option, not necessary, not an obligation. Tempus fugit.  That was the topic of one of my earliest blogs thinking back to my parents, and I still share that sense of time passing quickly and I still want to savor life and try to make a difference for others in the way I live the years that remain to me.    So summer is ending, this strange and tense summer of 2020, and I am noting my own migration from one home--my summer home for eight decades now--to my winter home where I've lived since 1964 through  many life changes.     

The nights are not just cooler now, a few have actually been cold, in the 40s. I got out the heavy down quilt I’ve had for many decades, purchased for camping long ago, and now the perfect cover for my bed on late August and early September nights. The lake is still warm enough that I continue my morning habit of going straight from that warm bed, putting on a bathing suit, and swimming out and around my raft before breakfast, even before a cup of coffee. It’s my zen. But each day the air and the water are just a bit chillier, and mist rises off the water where they meet. And coming back from that swim I light a fire.

When the temperature drops my migratory instincts kick in.  The leaves begin to turn; many birds prepare to head south, and I’m slowly packing up, putting away sheets and towels, emptying out whatever has collected in the freezer over the summer, listing all the chores needed before I can stash what I need in my car for the long drive back to New Rochelle. And yes, I do know how gorgeous the fall is here, how magical the reflection of all the colors on the lake. During the 90s when I lived in Indiana, a scant seven hour drive from Long Lake, I often came up on weekends, kept a fire burning all day, canoed on the lake, and reveled in that beauty.

But the 20 hour drive from New York is too much for weekends, and when I leave this time it will be until next June, unless I fly out to visit daughter Madeleine and Chad sometime during the winter months. I haven’t been on a plane since the virus took over our lives and don’t plan any non-essential travel for the foreseeable future.

What a summer!  What a year!  For me it was going to be the summer of the book, Northern Harvest:Twenty Michigan Women in Food and Farming, with readings scheduled in bookstores and other venues from Ann Arbor to Petoskey. Of course none of that happened. But several bookstores did carry the book—one even celebrated it as the summer of 2020 book--and through contacts from some of the women celebrated in the book there was a review in the Record Eagle, an interview with a reporter from a local TV channel, and a radio interview with David Boylan and his Lick the Plate.  All good. I’m grateful. 

The impetus behind the book was never to make money but to create good publicity for this region and for the twenty wonderful women I was privileged to interview.  Oral history is the best and most personal way to record our lives because it’s in our own words and shares our own memories. Even with the virus several of us were able to get together one evening at Angela's magical Light of Day Tea Farm.

With only a few days remaining before I drive east I’m savoring every moment, watching the lake in all its changeable moods, enjoying the cardinals and goldfinches and red bellied nuthatches at my feeder, soon to be stashed away for the winter.  

Each morning swim since I got here in June was a treasure, as were the windy afternoons when I took out the little green sunfish, balancing my weight against the winds as it heeled and kept course loyally.  A sturdy little boat, an old one befitting its aging mistress, it was built in 1972 and lacks some of the improvements of later models like a larger cockpit or the window in the sail, but it fits me perfectly to the point where I resist taking a second passenger.  The higher the winds, the more I feel the balance, it heels and I lean or let out the sail or head up. If ever I lost my balance and slipped it could easily flip, but I take care and hope this won’t happen. Capsizing seemed like fun when I was just learning to sail as a teenager, but I’d rather not have to right the boat now, although I’m sure I could still manage to stand on the centerboard.

My grandsons are coming tomorrow to help put away the two sunfish, a lengthy process of draining any water from the subfloorings, taking off the sails, the masts, hauling the two boats into the family boathouse, work I could never accomplish without help.  And tonight or tomorrow someone else will come for the biggest task, to bring the ancient heavy raft in off the lake and onto the shore, a task requiring multiple helpers and even a tractor. And then all will be put away and ready for the winter’s hibernation. Nothing more to do except load all my flotsam and jetsam into the Prius for the long drive home.

Quarantining as we’ve all done this summer is not so different from my normal life as a retired single woman.  Also, as someone whose best company from childhood has always been a book, being alone is what I do best, without ever being lonely or bored.  Someone in the NYTimes was writing recently, I think a therapist, about boredom and how the quarantining has brought about depression stemming from the enforced isolation and boredom.  So long as there is a book within my reach boredom is simply not something I experience.  Yes, I’ve baked a lot more since March, but that’s always fun and the problem has been to whom to give the resulting loaves and cookies. And maybe I’ve read even more than usual, but that’s all good.

Living mostly alone in this cottage with occasional visits from daughter Madeleine and her sons--and a wonderful ten days in July with my son and his family--but mostly alone, I’ve experienced a few homeowner emergencies, an invasion of rodents—not mice but those larger critters, chipmunks and even a squirrel—and it took from June until mid-August to locate and close off their extraordinary access hole, something they must have spent many hours/weeks/months chewing last winter until it would have easily admitted raccoons as well as rodents. After paying a fair bit of $$ to pest control folk to put around mousetraps and bait—none of which helped reduce the traffic--I finally met the real problem when a squirrel landed in the hallway just outside my bedroom. I chased him into a bathroom, shut him in and called my builder for help.  A very busy guy, he recognized that this was an emergency and came quickly, located that extraordinary access hole, and closed it.

Another morning I awoke to running water, not from sinks or toilets but outside the house, underneath a screened walkway.  Broken pipes? The cottage dates from 1967 so all its parts are aging as I age. Standing water under the walkway was already spreading under the kitchen and livingroom. The cottage sits only on cinderblocks.  Not good.  I located and turned off the fuse that controls the well and waited for the same lovely builder—my savior—who came again on short notice and located the source of this latest emergency, not a broken pipe, but only a broken clamp that held two pipes together. Mirabile dictu, he had just the needed part on his truck from some other recent job.  So now I have to hope lightening won’t strike thrice and that when I do leave in a few days there won’t be any further emergency. What saved the cottage from disaster on those other two occasions was that I was there—I could shut up that squirrel when he dropped in so he didn’t have the run of the house. I could turn off the water from the broken clamp before the entire house was sitting on a lake.  Lucky timing.

Except on Facebook and among friends I don’t talk much about politics, but I do feel that our country and the planet are at a crossroads, that this is a true emergency, that our democracy is endangered through greed, callousness, cruelty, racism . . . and that the planet is endangered through the same forces that set short term profit over long term survival. Fires in California, hurricanes on the East Coast, drought in so many parts of the world, millions of refugees on every continent. My invasion of rodents and that broken clamp are trivial, the work of a day to mend, but these larger issues will take longer, probably more than the rest of my life to truly mend.  And unless we set a different course this November, they may never mend.

Once back in New York I will do everything in my power to get out the vote in November. All summer I and millions of other men and women have been writing postcards and letters, some designed by NAACP, some by ACLU, all with the purpose of getting out the vote and advising folk in the many states trying to suppress the vote to check their voter IDs in advance to make sure they are properly registered in accordance with whatever requirements their state may have mandated, so that when the time comes they can vote either in person or absentee.

It’s very clear that the party in power recognizes that in fact it has no legitimacy, that if everyone were to vote who should vote that this president and his party would be voted out in a landslide.  I hope and pray that we can make this happen.  Our future and the future of our planet depend on it. Sic transit . . .