wrapping it all up

I just can't resist posting the last of the Schoodic pictures for this year.

This amazing place we get to spend so much of our summer is made possible by Patti and her brother who own, run and maintain the camp and are so generous to also let us use it. They grew up spending their summers at the camp and now we are so lucky that our kids get to call it their favorite place too.  A big thank you to Patti especially who makes so much of our Schoodic summer fun possible. 

Wow, is leaving there ever a sad good bye.  As we were packing up to go, Patti said, "Well isn't this a sad turn of events."  Yes, indeed.

But look what we get to remember:

Ella doesn't so much jump off the dock as simply run off it.  We never tired of watching.

Kristi and her husband Mike (who NEVER comes to Schoodic- no, we can't understand why- and came 2 days in a row!)

My mom and Sandi's mom, laughing over something:

One night we had a campfire on the beach and then the kids lite sparklers.  The fire had been popping and throwing sparks as it plowed through the 2x4 kindling so Sandi put the metal cover over it.  Shortly after, spinning her sparkler in the air, Ella backed right up INTO the fire.  Thankfully the cover was on it and her tender, bare skin landed on hot metal rather than open flame and Sandi was very nearby and threw her promptly into the lake.

This is Ella about 10 seconds before her fateful event.

Luckily, Sandi is a nurse with all sorts of cool, nursey supplies she had those second degree burns cleaned and dressed before you could say "burn unit" and they are healing nicely.

I may be able to sneak the girls out for one more day trip to camp before school starts but it will be chillier, windier and with a touch of September in the air.  And so we are left to pine until next year, knowing that the distance and the seasons make it all that much more sweet a return. 

The hardest part in leaving is not even in the missing of this place.  It is in the certainty that nothing next summer will be exactly as it was this summer.  When you measure your kids lives day by day time passes at a more natural pace.  When you measure it year by year in a place like this, somehow the passing seems cruelly unfair.  And, I suppose, so is life as a parent.

So I leave with this on my heart:  Enjoy this moment.  There will never be another one like it.