August 11: Birthday

Today was my mother's birthday, and we celebrated at my sister and brother-in-law's camp on the lake en famille: my sister, brother-in-law, two nieces, my brother-in-law's parents, his brother and sister-in-law and their baby girl, my parents, and us. The clouds that had lurked overhead all day bunched up against the green hills to clear the skies, as the glow of the setting sun cast a rich light on the clouds, the water, the surrounding pines. My husband caught a frog to show my niece. Fish jumped. Pewees called back and forth in the forest. As dusk fell, bats fluttered back and forth. My niece learned the constellation Cassiopeia, who turns out to have been a queen of Ethiopia, where one of her friends was born. We walked barefoot down to the dock to look for falling stars from the Perseid meteor shower but only saw the plumes of our breath in the crisp air.

My brother-in-law grilled steak and lobster; his mother made potato salad and tomato and beet salad; his brother made an apple pie; my sister provided a birthday cake with candles; we brought fresh Beech Hill blueberries. We all feasted with much joy and laughter. We left as the almost-full moon was rising, full as the moon ourselves and happy.

When I'm 64,
I want this too: lake, family,
good food, stories, stars.

July 16: Hawk Family

Driving down a dirt road through the woods ("15 MPH Dust!") to check out for the first time my sister and brother-in-law's new lakeside camp this afternoon, I was thrilled to see a broad-winged hawk fly across the road in front of me. It was followed by two more, which looked by their plumage to be youngsters. They perched together up in a big pine.

The camp is perfect, the kind you want your kids to spend all their summers in so that they grow up remembering their childhood as a series of sunny weeks of loon calls, the thrum of small motorboats, the slam of screen doors; of padding through pine needles in bare feet or running down the wooden dock to jump off into the cool embrace of the lake; of tipping the canoe, eating hot dogs, playing card games after dark, and seeing stars reflected in the water...

As I went for my first swim of the summer and then read in the sun in an Adirondack chair on the big porch, I visualized all this for my two nieces' future.

Hawk with two fledglings--
I always see signs in things:
my sister, her girls.