My Heart's Right There...

I went back to what used to be my summertime home-away-from-home today. It had been years since I had been out there; a quiet little place along one of the most beautiful lakes in the world.

The scenery on the way there looked familiar, surprisingly few alterations despite the years. This one house had the coolest thing, a little phone booth type thing for their children to wait in for the bus (they had a huge driveway). It was gone, those kids are now adults. One of the weirdest things was my perception of the lakeside houses as I went past, they all looked so small now. I looked at this one place we rented before we bought our own and was astonished at how tiny it seemed. It had been such a big place when I stayed there.

I thought of my summertime friends and what ever became of them. Natalie on the right and Sam and her older sister Claire and younger sister Rebecca on the left. I don't even know how old we were when we last saw each other, twelve or younger I imagine. I remember staying over with Sam, who was about my age, and shelling peas while talking with her grandfather about B-17 Flying Fortresses back in the war. I can still smell the mosquito netting that hung around our bed. We read from a Nancy Drew book until we fell asleep.

As I got to our cottage my thoughts immediately drifted to my mother, who was taken from us this Easter after a horrifying ordeal with cancer. It felt so strange being there without her, we had gone out there every summer for maybe ten years or so. I started crying and popped the top of my first beer.

The winds were strong and the water was so choppy today. I sat on the deck and just watched the big fluffy clouds roll by. I smiled as I looked across the lake and saw the clouds' shadows drifting slowly on the opposite shore. Across from where our cottage is, alongside the cliffs of the opposite shore, is a beach made of fossils of an ancient sea creature. I used to be really into fossils, for a time I dreamt of becoming a paleontologist. Those thoughts reminded me of my fossil collection I had amassed and I went to go look for it in the old cabinet in the boat house.

As I looked at the fossils, beer in my hand, I paused for a moment and shook my head. I never imagined I'd be there one day drinking a beer. I never imagined being there without my mom.

A lone duck swam by and stayed in the area. As I watched her drift on the waves I thought of how much I envied her. She didn't seem to have a care in the world, she could just let herself be carried by the current, if she didn't want to she could fly away or just hop out on land, and she got to live at the lovely lake... I wished I was her.

The other night I was asked what my 'safe place' is, what place you have in your mind that you feel at peace in, but I couldn't say... until today. Unlike many other places in my life, my memories from the lake are maybe 90%+ pleasant. A few bad, but nothing too horrid. It's been the setting for many dreams, despite not having been there in so long. My very first My Little Pony dream was there - the Cutie Mark Crusaders running around in the wooded area out back. I've seen great destroyers, submarines, massive cargo ships sailing impossibly across the waters in my dreams. I've seen UFOs silently gliding above the water in the dreamland. All sorts of dreams, some mundane, some crazy like the time I dreamt of there being a high security compound of some millionaire and I ended up inside and had to sneak my way back out, swimming for dear life.

The wind blew a mournful tune across my swiftly-emptying, final bottle of beer. A fitting reminder that so much of my time is past. It seems like just yesterday I was fishing and swimming without a care just like that duck....

There are no refills on life.