Second-hand lake, second-hand sky

The water is cool. It always is. I hesitate on the second rung with my feet submerged. The air is cool, too, but the colour of the light convinced me to swim. Silver ripples on the water, golden light on the trees. This swim will last me all winter.

My family’s church is connected to the camp on this lake and I’ve been coming here as long as I can remember, my family longer. On the wall of my childhood house, there was a photo of my very-young parents standing on the shore, holding my newborn eldest sister in a blanket. I always thought they looked funny. Not quite my parents yet though I recognised their expressions. Their old-fashioned swimsuits were vaguely embarrassing. But that blanket – the one wrapped around my sister – that was familiar. Yellow and woolly. I can feel it in my fingers now.

That sister grew up, learned to cook and worked in the camp’s kitchen when I was a camper. I slept in the cabins with the other kids, played in the forest, and learned to swim. Later, I worked at the camp, too, almost every summer. I remember canoe trips and campfires, chapel and thunderstorms and games. Canada Day fireworks and the Thanksgiving weekends when we put the canoes away for the winter and shuttered up the cabins against the coming snow.

I learned a lot beside this lake, and I’m here again, but this time not to work. I’ve been working hard recently because we’ve recently sold that childhood house and it’s my job to deal with the remnants that now sit in a storage unit waiting to be sorted. What do you do with your father’s childhood books? What about your great grandfather’s newspaper clippings? The drifts of your own school photographs that accumulated over the years?

Letting go

I made the usual piles: chuck, donate, question, keep. It’s not easy work but it needs to be done. My daughter worked beside me to speed me up when I slowed down and to pull her brother’s ultrasound photo out of the trash when I filed too quickly. Some things stay. Some go. That’s the way with family things and all things. We receive. We hold. We give again.

In that old lake photograph, sand sticks to my mother’s bare feet, and standing here on this second rung, I wonder if the water felt cool that day, too. It always does. My hands grip the sides of the ladder as I let myself down one more rung. It’s cold, going in slowly like this, and I think of both my daughter and my eldest son who were here at camp this past summer, swimming in this lake. They’ve told me some of their summer stories but not all, which is how it should be. Now I turn to face the water, and the surface is dazzling as I decide to let go and let the water catch me.

Above the lake, the familiar, second-hand sky still holds its tent of light.