I’ve been thinking about this question for a very long time, and I’ve concluded that summer is my favorite season.
Yes, even though I have wonderful memories from Spring, Winter and Autumn, it is in the summertime when every bed is occupied and sometimes the kids camp in sleeping bags in the boathouse.
There is something ineffable about summer in the Adirondacks. The sun rises bright and warm and cuts through the swirling mists by the lake shore. The pine trees release something in the air that smells like patience.
The overachieving triathletes brew their first cup of coffee before sunrise and hit the trails with flashlights on their foreheads. The teenagers sleep soundly until the crack of noon.
I have learned to love them all. Even the ones that I used to despise. I guess that since this is my hundredth-year anniversary, I have learned to withhold judgement by accepting that every single guest is doing their very best with what they have.
I don’t want to sound mushy, but I have adopted a new term, I call it therapy. It’s very handy. If a young punk decides to spray paint the boathouse or use his penknife to scratch graffiti on the bathroom door, I simply call it “spray therapy” or “graffiti therapy”. I acknowledge that I don’t understand what drives the urge to vandalize. But it is there, and it must emerge.
The founders, who a hundred years ago built the first hunting lodge on the shores of Rainbow Lake, were all middle-aged men who drank heavily until they passed out. I used to look down on them and judge them harshly. Now that I look back, I miss them. Despite their many flaws, their hearts were in the right place. They came to the camp in search of refuge. I now call their boisterous excesses “alcohol therapy”. Because, you see, as you grow older you recognize your own shortcomings. Now I realize that I only saw one very special side of their lives. I only saw the hunting, the hanging and carving of the deer, the drinking, the laughter, the drunken brawls, the nicknames and carrying on. But, what about their lives back home? Were they trapped in loveless marriages? Were they desperately bored or alienated at work? Is it possible that they too lived lives of quiet desperation?
The young lovers are easy to understand. I call it “kissing therapy”. The hunger, the thirst, eternal goosebumps all over their skin, the tight embraces, the skinny dipping in the lake in the middle of the night. What were they celebrating if not the simple joy of carrying a burning heart?
There was a single mother who had four beautiful children, three daughters and a son. They made pizza in the outdoor oven and remembered how their father would lovingly draft a shopping list with the custom ingredients for each child’s pizza. I call this “remembrance therapy” and it pierces my heart.
And the old folks who are brought in minivans along with their wheelchairs. The old folk whose fires have all but burnt out and who slowly push their walkers up and down the gravel paths as if they were the dying embers of a fire on which they must expire. They all have happy and grateful hearts. They have outlived everyone they knew. When they speak, they speak softly with tentative recollections of half-forgotten narratives of promising careers, of marriages and divorces, of children, grandchildren and great grandchildren bragging about great successes in business that no one remembers, or failures and bankruptcies that no one knew about. They are my favorite. They have “wisdom therapy”. If only the young ones would stop their frenetic running and just sit by their side to hear their stories.
In my humble opinion “pregnancy therapy” is the most beautiful therapy of all. I have seen so many young women with tremendous talent and powerful dreams of fame and fortune who suddenly fall in love against their will. They wanted to be independent. They wanted to work. They wanted to make a personal mark. They wanted to be doctors and politicians, to act and sing and dance and write and make movies. But mysteriously, they find themselves pregnant and they have a child. And the little animal in their arms smells more fragrantly than any perfume they have ever smelled. The skin of the little creature is softer than the breeze. The baby sighs – and the mother’s heart is enslaved.
I have seen 5 generations come and go. And much too frequently, I have seen great ambitions derailed by a pregnancy – or perhaps redirected to a higher purpose.