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| Red Camp is the Audet Camp Yellow Camp owned by my Grandmother's sister |
Last Monday I was feeling the love for my precious Grammie and Grampy and my favorite place on earth when I accompanied my female relatives to the lakeside town in the state of Maine called China. It is a wondrous thing to tread in a place where generations of your family members have trod and quite a special thing to visit a place you have been visited all of your life. As I looked it over I could hardly believe that I have been visiting this place for forty years.
My grandparents are in their eighties now and is is a labor of love to help them open "camp", as we call it, affectionately for the season. Winter is hard on a summer cottage in Maine and with brooms and buckets of water we scrubbed and cleaned. We dusted and vacuumed and cleared out cobwebs. We made beds with freshly laundered linens. We washed out cub boards and cleaned all the windows. It is very true that many hands make work light and in no time at all we had gotten that "camp" into fine summer readiness.
It is our gathering place and it calls to us when the air turns warm. I can hear the whisper no matter where I am but I hear it the loudest when I am in Maine. Years ago our family, actually extended family, had an entire grouping of cottages on China Lake but those have given way to the times and now are owned by strangers. When my mother was a child summers were spent in the presence of family who stayed there and played there all summer long year after year.
I am sad to say that on Monday when everyone was giving their love gifts to my grandparents I was able to give the least, having been sick as of late. I was not able to work as long or as hard as the others. I wish with all of my being that my contribution could have been the largest portion because it would have better reflected the love that I feel in my heart for them and for that place..."camp"..my favorite place. Opening up camp could never be work for me because it feels more like a privilege but then I suppose that this is the way that love gifts are supposed to feel.
Grammie and Grampy, I love you both so much. Thank you for the years and years of enjoyment that you have given me and the happy memories I have of being at camp.
Susan
2 comments:
Great blog on a great heart warming subject. last year i help clean with joe this year it was so nice to clean along side you while we recalled memories and shared love and laughter. Love you and the memories!
Oh, Susan, your contribution was much more than you think that day. It was so nice to just be able to have you there with us, cleaning in spirit whenever your body demanded that you take a break. It was a treat for us just to have the "girls" all tackling a chore that can seem endless and tedious with only a few hands on deck. We were so grateful that you all took time from your vacation, wedding plans and travel fatigue to journey the 2 hours to help us. Grammy came home with a huge weight and burden lifted off from her knowing that her camp was open and ready to go. This means more to her than you can imagine. She has spent every summer of her entire life in that camp, from a little girl to an elderly woman. Life is just not "right" for her if she can't be at China Lake in the summer. So, thank you for your contributions that day, they were more than you think.
Sarah
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