This is a long post for a long weekend.
Summer is ending. I can taste it. The rain feels a little bit colder, the nights are longer, the days don’t warm up until after noon.
As such it is fitting that most of this weekend was spent outside. I fled Binghamton late afternoon on Friday, and headed West for the lakes and home. Me and my mom walked the Catherine Valley Trail from Watkins Glen to Montour Falls and back again.
Then we had dinner on the deck at the Village Marina and I wondered aloud about the dead bodies I’m certain are in Seneca lake and what their state of decomposition is. My black bean mushroom burger was fantastic in spite of this. We stopped for dark chocolate hazelnut ice cream on the way back to my parents house but had to sit in the car because the beginning of dusk had already turned the world cold.
On the final drive from my parent’s to Lamoka lake I rode over the last big hill on Mud Lake Road and the sky unfurled in all directions. Everything was burnt orange like glowing embers in a campfire and heavy purple clouds rested on the hills like distant mountains and I morbidly thought “bury me here.” Bury me on these hills, above these lakes so I can wake (because I’d be a ghost, of course) in the gray change before sunset and watch the sky turn orange every night for eternity.
Night fell soon after I arrived and we walked the dog down the gritty dirt lake road under a globe of stars so bright you could see the milk in the milky way.
Saturday was Farmer’s markets and then hard winds off the lake that drove us into the woods. We found a trail all to ourselves and we walked and walked and didn’t want it to end, but eventually time calls you back to your life and we had to turn around. That gusty night we spent in the hills above Keuka, rotating around a campfire as the wind swirled the smoke at us no matter where we tried to stand.
Sunday was a perfect, sunny, robins egg blue. I spent it with my Mom, sister, and nieces, mostly at a playground where we splashed in an altogether gross creek and walked the nature trails, “investigating” a short cut back to the playground. It was a very long shortcut.
My nieces climbed the big rocks lining the roadside and I envied them that the world is still so new for them. I told my sister later that I wouldn’t go back to being that age, it’s hard work being that small. My Mom asked if I thought adulthood wasn’t hard and my sister put in that being a teenager was awful too. I added that by the time you retire you’re too tired to do all the things you wish you could do. I guess life is hard all the way through then. It made me wonder if there’s a sweet spot, a small moment where everything is perfect. A place where you’re old enough to appreciate it but not so old you’re burdened with the responsibilities of living a life. If there is such a place I think I probably missed it. It passed me by and I didn’t even notice.
After the playground we cooked dinner on my parent’s rickety grill and the girls played, and begged us to play with them. But every year I feel a little more tired, a little less able to chase tiny feet in a game of tag. And that is dreadfully sad.
I woke Monday to warm but violent winds and I drove back to Binghamton chased by gray skies and the whole way home I thought “just don’t bury me in Binghamton.”