I spent a lot of time at Sunapee this summer. . .

. . . not as much as David and I did in 2014 during our grand adventure, but several weeks beyond the usual. (Thanks, Helen, for your gracious hospitality!)

It was the summer of weddings, so there were lots of opportunities to spend time with family, both at weddings and at the lake . . .

Captain Courtney

Chelsea, Courtney, Sunny, Brittany at Charlie and Catie’s wedding

. . . but also some good quiet alone time to process this first summer at Sunapee without David. Not easy. Here are two of my favorite David pictures from the stairway wall . . .

Newborn David

Little kid David

I’m back in a new writing workshop at Lighthouse Writers in Denver, and here’s something I wrote for it that seems appropriate to include here:

*****

Tube for One?

There’s no one on the dock when I go down there, and the bay is quiet, but the paddle board is gone, so I walk carefully through the boathouse, watching for dock spiders and rotting boards, out the other door and around back to where the old inner tubes are stacked. I slide one out from under the collection of random inflatables, gingerly wipe off the webs, and roll it back through and out onto the broad side of the dock, shucking my flip-flops at the top of the steps leading into the water. The lake is cold and clear as vodka. Making sure the long inflation stem is facing down, I ease myself into the tube, bracing for the shock of cold, and push off and away from the shallows, only then realizing how enormous it is, really better for two people than one. It must have been an inner tube just like this that David and I used forty years ago when we’d float together out into the bay, newly engaged, planning our future. And suddenly, I have to decide. Can I do this? Or do I get out? Go back up to the house. It was only that first summer that we floated together in a shared inner tube. Decades of summers followed where I’d laze in a tube on the rippling, undulating water, watching the clouds drifting overhead, the water-bugs skittering across the surface, the dragonflies tickling my knees, while David hauled brush from the woods or stacked firewood or tamed Virginia Creeper, both of us doing what we loved most. So why is the memory of that first summer so sharp?

I’d already been clothes-lined a few days before by the hot, musty, woodsy scent of the family room and the sight of Ebenezer, the retired carousel horse, his proud head thrown back, on his rockers in the corner, awaiting the next generation of children. David had told me about him before I ever saw Sunapee. And that smell. The balsa pine of the long drive, the unfinished wood of the interior walls and that unforgettable scent of an ancient lake house slowly rotting in unsuspected corners. Soon there were other Sunapee scents for me, like fresh-cut lime for my gin and tonic, but that one doesn’t have the power to wound. I’ve long-since adopted it for other places and other times. But the family room, closed as it usually is, holds the purest essence of Sunapee and it rocked me. I delivered what I’d come up to put away, turned and reached a hand out to caress the snout of Ebenezer, although I didn’t get on him this time. He’s big enough for an adult, and I’ve been on him before, for a laugh, but it wasn’t laughter I was feeling. I turned and went back down the stairs to the kitchen, suddenly disoriented by the hubbub of the family at cocktail hour. My brother-in-law sensed something and ask if I was okay, and the tears came. He put an arm around me and my mother-in-law, watching from the next room, blew me a kiss. I am loved here, and I belong, even without David, but this is the first summer without him, and oh, how he is missed.

There is no safe-haven from grief I’m discovering. No place where it cannot touch you. In this year of firsts, I’m just trying to get through them all, experimenting with doing things the same as always, or maybe with a slight twist, something a little new, like music on the radio on the drive to the lake-house from the airport. It worked for a while, but the stations kept fading away. The woods are too dense. Which is probably why we never bothered with the radio before.  Maybe the way we’ve always done things is the best way, but surely there are new possibilities. Which hurts less, I wonder? Which helps most? The old way or something new? The only answer I’ve found so far is there is no one right answer.

*****

It’s been nine months today, since he’s been gone, and he is still so deeply missed.

Wishing you grace and peace like this moon-rise in the midst of whatever challenge you may be facing. I know I’m not the only one.

God be with you.