TROLLEY

For most of my childhood, summers were spent entirely at home. I remember lying on the ground in the backyard for seeming hours, eyeballs tickled by blades of grass as I watched ants scurrying and beetles lumbering. 

I picked strawberries and green beans from my mom’s garden in the mornings, bare feet on the damp earth. I rode bikes with my brothers around our neighborhood. We walked to my grandmother’s house around the corner. A particular thrill was when my dad would call from work to let us know when to be ready in our bathing suits, and he’d bring us to the community pool at the state park for as much time as possible before it closed. I love every one of those memories.

But then! The summer I turned fourteen, Mom and Dad were able to work out a week away for our whole family! In a cabin on a lake! We loved it so much that we went back every year, and many of us still do, including my husband and kids.

Until we grew up and started moving out, we always went the third week of August, just as visitors were streaming into our city -- Saratoga Springs -- for the Travers Stakes. We happily headed north out of town, and as soon as we turned off the Northway at our exit, we opened the van windows to the piney mountain air. We pointed to the deep blue water through the trees as we drove the last few minutes. We sat forward in our seats and chattered with each other and laughed loudly.

Our tiny cabin smelled like damp woods, and its tiny kitchen smelled like propane; both smells still bring me right back to those happy days. We had one tiny bathroom for the eight of us at the back of the house, and the entire first floor tilted toward it. The screened-in porch was a third of the size of the rest of the house; we hung wet bathing suits out there, left our sandy shoes by the screen door that banged open and shut all day, stored beach toys and water floats, welcomed visitors, and hung out, looking at the lake.

We swam every day, rain or shine. Mom made hot meals that calmed our chattering teeth and pinked our blue lips after hours in the cold lake water. We walked into town for gift shop treasures, and Mom offered rare snacks of Doritos and Cheetos and chips each late afternoon. Dad and us older kids played cards every night, and for the first few years there was an ice cream shop directly across the street, which we walked to every single night.

By that week, fall had arrived up north, hesitantly — you could see it in the deepening color of the sky, the shift in the clouds, the different shadows, and feel it in the cooler evenings. The smell of campfires changed from summer cookouts to fall leaves burning, and by the time we headed home there was even a fiery leaf or two at the tops of the trees along the highway. I loved this punctuation mark at the end of our summer and the anticipation that led up to it, and I loved getting back into the normalcy of the school year once we were home.

Now, as a mom, I try to cultivate quiet, uneventful summers at home for my boys. I want them to have a chance to be bored, to lay around, to let their minds wander and come back again. 

But I’m also grateful that they have the lake and its waterlogged days and exhausted nights, sandy feet and sandy clothes, ice cream, afternoon chip snacks, and our new traditions of “Every Night is Movie Night” when we’re there for our week, and going up for Sunday dinner every week that we’re not. So wholesome and healthy! Such a gift.