I'm working on goofy stuff to put on my etsy store. Everything else in the store has been very serious and sophisticated. People will be surprised to see something silly in there.
I'm trying to teach myself how to scale down my paintings and make smaller ones. I never planned to, but the time has come to face the fact, that I have to sell them online. They're not selling in stores anymore and all the good galleries are booking one and a half to two years in advance.
I'm actually considering moving to a different part of the country. It's cheaper to live in most other states and just because I think snow is beautiful—doesn't mean I have to shovel it. Someplace on a lake. I always thought I had to be by the ocean. I used to just lay in the sun and tan, jump in the waves, go anywhere in any kind of boat and fish. Now I think of skin cancer, undertows, rip tides, rogue waves, bad winds, worms in the fish, pollution and sharks when I swim at night or in a kayak.
I was having, an admittedly weird, talk with a friend about where I would like my ashes scattered when I'm dead. I didn't feel a doubt. The only place for me was the lake where I spent my summers as a kid.
It was a big, cold, clear, spring fed lake. As clear as any water I've seen and as smooth as glass in the morning, with fog lifting off it. There were gorgeous sunsets over Mt. Washington. There was a giant old abandoned yellow hotel falling into disrepair overlooking one end of the lake. Like a ghost. The town had an orange and turquoise Howard Johnson's by the drawbridge, where you could get the all-important ice creams. A tacky gift shop. A combination grocery and liquor store with a slamming screen door, Elmer Plumber's marina, which was also the gas station and a school with a playground that had a TALL slide, REAL jungle gyms and REAL swings with chains and wooden seats. The kind that are considered deadly for today's little darlins' who are too stupid to duck.
A dairy truck came down the path to our camp and my Mother would buy milk and light cream for her ever-present cup of coffee. A Nissan truck would come too and she'd get bread, powdered donuts and cupcakes with frosting on top about an inch high.
When we wanted drinking water we'd go to a path by the side of the road and walk a little way down a rock path to an old wooden barrel buried in the ground. It was surrounded by moss and was chilly. You'd lift the top off the barrel and it was overflowing with cold spring water. There was a big metal dipper there and we HAD to drink out of the dipper before we filled our water bottles. It was magic.
We had a campfire every night or went to someone else's. My Dad's friends camped there too so the parental units were often happy and silly, which wasn't standard procedure. It was so easy to make friends there. You'd figure out somebody's name and start hanging around with them. There was a dumpy little store with white-bearded Mr Whitney sitting behind the counter, where we could take our Sunday dime and buy two candy bars. There was a dumpy wooden rec. hall with booths, a juke box and two pinball machines. I remember San Franciscan Nights, Red Rubber Ball, Light my fire, the beach boys. Baby it's You was my favorite. I can still sing it. There were always fascinating older kids in there, dancing or goofing around figuring out how to get beer. If it wasn't swimming weather, that's where I wanted to be. I couldn't figure out how the hell people got quarters for pinball machines. Sometimes this boy Michael Terrill from Aroostook County Maine would let me play the last pinball. He was my first boyfriend. He just said he was my boy friend. We held hands but we didn't even get a kiss in. A few years later when he was sixteen or so, he came back with his wife and baby.
Dad had a little Sprite sailboat. You could zip down the lake in it, but never get back without paddling, scratching your butt on the fiberglass floor and getting a sunburn. Later we got the most beautiful motor boat. Driving it was heaven and freedom. I met a boy named Christopher, when my sister and I were going under the drawbridge in that boat and he and his friend Barry were standing on old bridge pilings with their thumbs out for a ride. That is frozen in my memory forever. The sun, the breeze, the chill under the bridge, the smell of water and gas, hoping we wouldn't hit something with the outboard motor, the water lapping, the way the boat tips when someone gets in and those two cute guys. Barry was all charm and playing up to my sister from the start. Christopher and I just smiled at each other trying to make conversation. I have a lot of frozen moments, but if I ever forgot this one, I would be somebody else. One of my favorite memories. We went on some dates because my mother wouldn't let my sister go out with Barry unless they took me with them. One time we went to the first MacDonalds I had ever seen and I got french fries. Christopher and I dated a little later when I graduated from college and coincidentally ended up working with some of his friends.
I dated a another guy I met at the lake, who will remain nameless, for two years. He was 'tough' because he smoked cigarettes and drank beer and had an old white mustang and a 'gang' of friends who were funny and loud. It was so much fun and he was nicer to me than any other person has been in my whole life. I broke up with him when I started college because his dad carried a gun, one of his uncles that lived with them ran off to get away from gambling debts and his other uncle was 'disappeared' for who know what reason. He married a neighborhood girl and had kids. Hope he's happy.
I won't go back to the lake. I thought about it a few times, but I don't want to see it surrounded by rich houses, condos and the lake churning like a washing machine with hundreds of boats and jet skis. I'm sure someone has stolen the dipper in the spring, broken the barrel and filled it with garbage. There's probably an expensive restaurant by the bridge, a CVS, a Richdale and a playground with sawdust under the four foot high plastic slide—and canvas swings.
