Academically and professionally, Carol Felice Fitzgibbons was immersed in the business world. It wasn't until retirement that she contemplated writing.
The issue was that she felt unqualified without a creative writing degree. And so Carol took to the task at hand. She spent months studying her craft, attended many conferences and writing workshops and, most fruitful of all, joined what she describes as a fabulous local critique group.
Today, after many revisions, her first book is complete, a door has opened, and she’s eager to begin writing the next one.
Summers on Tully Lake
By Carol Felice Fitzgibbons
Arriving home, the last day of school each June, report card in hand, I’d find my mother packing our station wagon, with everything a family of five might need for the summer.
I longed to pull her aside and whisper in her ear, “Remember, pack only the happy stuff, Mom. Leave the sad stuff behind.”
By midnight, my parents, two older sisters, my dog Pepper and I were on our way to our camp on Tully Lake, outside Syracuse, our home the rest of the year.
Our camp was a rustic little place, painstakingly and lovingly built by Dad, from found lumber and rusty nails he hammered back to straight, good as new. There was no plumbing, short of a big red pump that needed priming, bolted to our kitchen side-board, the drain pipe spilling water to a rock bed below.
I began each morning donning my bathing suit. As I snatched a bar of soap and a bottle of shampoo, Pepper wiggled in anticipation. We’d race together, as best friends do, eager to be the first to reach the water, the first to splash, our joy spilling over us.
With no phone or television, my sisters and I learned to make our own fun. We’d go for hikes, always with a snake stick in hand. We’d swing endlessly on the rope swing Dad made for us and we’d swim. We’d take rowboat rides and go night fishing with Dad. Each afternoon, I’d reach under our dock where two big-black-bull frogs bobbed, as if waiting for me to scoop them up, to rub their noses and bellies, trusting me to release them back to safety.
With tray tables as our desks, we’d play school, my oldest sister always snagging the coveted role of the mean teacher wielding the pointer. Monopoly, Parcheesi and card games were always in play, as well as never-ending jigsaw puzzles set up on our screen porch, begging for attention.
This was a reader’s paradise. My favorites involved horses, My Friend Flicka and Black Beauty, the pages worn thin. Perched in my upper bunk of our tiny bedroom, windows open, Pepper held tight, I’d fall asleep to a symphony of crickets chirping and the deep-throated drone of an army of bull frogs.
Above all, my favorite thing to do was sitting at the edge of our dock, my feet cooling in the water, Pepper close by my side. I became one with the lake. And although there was no escaping the undercurrent in our family, the stillness captured me: the smell of pine, the musty shore, hills of trees as far as I could see. Being alone. I drank it all in, the stillness never leaving me.
Damn the two-sided coin, for without it, this would have painted an idyllic picture.
My parents were able to escape their shattered dreams during our summers on Tully Lake. Maybe Mom felt the same stillness I felt because her drinking ceased here. Or perhaps, with Dad at work, Mom held it together knowing the survival of her three little girls near water was in her hands. Like the bullfrogs under our dock, did Dad take a leap of faith trusting that Mom could do this?
They were at their happiest here. We all were. If we’d lived all the seasons on Tully Lake, would my parents have found their happy ending? The hint of what could have been felt within reach here. But it was never meant to be.
Yet, life at this precious oasis amidst the storm, where the good memories far outweighed the bad, is what I choose to remember. Its essence grabbed hold of me and became so much a part of who I am, intertwining with my soul, forever finding a home there.