Month: July 2024

I’m back on Chincoteague Island for a very quick trip with my mom. My niece, who is more like a sister to me and daughter to my mom, is here with her husband and two kids. She wasn’t able to line up her week with ours earlier in the summer, so we came down for two nights to visit. We don’t get to see them often, since they moved to Ohio in November. My mom has really been missing the last of the “babies” (they’re nine and eleven).

My younger sister and I had planned to take both our parents, but my dad’s health has been complicated lately, and nobody felt comfortable taking him somewhere where the nearest hospital is an hour away.

When you only have two days here, you have to embrace every opportunity. After dinner, I swam in the ocean with the kids and made one of them into a mermaid and the other into an octopus in the sand and then watched the sun go down over Tom’s Cove.

I got up at 5:30 this morning as quietly as I could and slipped out to see the sunrise over the ocean. Then I biked around the wildlife loop and then to my favorite coffee and pastry shop.

Next: pick up some sandwiches and get ready for the beach.

Being back at Lake Winnepesaukee brings back so many memories, some foggier than others.

In the very early days, we camped in a canvas tent at Lane’s End campground in Melvin Village. I remember bursting out of the car after 12 hours in an unairconditioned Pinto station wagon, impatiently waiting for my dad to pitch the tent so I could throw on my older sister’s hand-me-down bikini and tear down to the end of the lane to jump in the lake with my sister while my mom tended to our baby sister.

The water was always cool and clear, the pine trees aromatic in the warm afternoon breeze.

When we got older, we started renting out one of Nori’s cabins. She was an older lady who lived in a red Cape Cod house at the edge of the lake just down the shore a bit from the campground. She had two matching cabins on her property; we would rent one, and my aunts and cousins would stay in the other.

We spent long summer days jumping off the end of the pier, walking down the road to the Hansel and Gretel Shop where we were allowed to pick out one souvenir and fish in the plastic pool for magnetic goldfish.

Nori passed away years ago, and a wealthy family has purchased her property. All three red houses are still there, but their days are numbered.

For now, everything looks the same.

We spent two days walking all over Boston and had a great time. It’s such a friendly city and so easy to navigate. We walked almost 20 miles and got very well acquainted with the T, their public transit system.

Now we’re in Wolfeboro, NH to enjoy some lake time and see my aunts (and to start my campaign to get Chris to fall in love with it up here – retirement??).

We rented a little cabin on a very small lake that connects to the larger Lake Wentworth. We’ll spend most of today at the town beach in Melvin Village on Lake Winnepesaukee, where we used to camp when I was a kid and later graduated to renting a cabin.

We let the kids sleep in this morning and walked the rails-to-trail path to town for coffee. It’s my favorite walk to coffee ever.

When I opened the back door this morning to empty some compost, I fully expected a wall of hot and humid air to envelop me, and I was stunned to be met with a cool, crisp, fresh new day.

I enjoyed sweeping leaves and a little light weeding and mulching in the middle of the day. Not ready to let it go this evening, I convinced Edwin to take a walk with me and then spent a half hour watering plants.

The fireflies started coming out as a finished, and the fairy lights I have in mason jars flicked on as the sun disappeared.

Can I be so bold as to hope for another one just like today?