Tell me, how can it be that my husband wants to go back to the cottage this weekend and take the motorboat out of the water. As usual, as is my role, I protest. “No, no, no, it can’t be time to take the boat out. Summer is hardly over.”
It was only a month ago that we had sixteen people at the cottage, some bedding down on air mattresses or couches, others wondering if they could sleep in the boat, rocking on the water through the night. And a few weeks after that we had loads of folks again, and in exasperation of emptying the dishwasher another time from meals of fresh buttery corn and juicy burgers and failed popsicles – I declared – “When will this end?”
And then it did.
Come back, you summer revellers. I don’t want to put the floaties away and stack the outside chairs and tie up the canoe against the rising water of next spring.
Let’s squeeze our eyes shut from the smoky fire and then squint into the night sky at the mid- summer comets. Let me get mildly upset that someone’s used my beach towel in their impatience to dry off from a swim so that they could slice the last peach in the box, before dribbling it with cream.
I want to not be able to decide between reading my book on the dock (yes, that silly book), and chatting with my visiting kids and their gregarious friends, or trying again to make those popsicles.
Even more so I want to take another solo early morning kayak ride on the lapping lake, watching in awe as the osprey flies over.
And so I wish now, that with each swim I had stayed in the lake even longer, floating on my back, adrift in water that was ever so, never so warm.
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