Time to leave Maine

In Spanish, “querencia” describes a place where one feels safe, a place from which one's identity is drawn, a place where one feels most at home. For some people, querencia is associated with nature—a particular city or landscape or body of water. For others, querencia is associated with certain people or animals. My querencia is summer at camp. Living in Maine in the summer centers me for the rest of the year when I can’t be here.




Now it is late August. Once again, we are sleeping under the comforter, not just a single sheet. Acorns drop from the oaks onto the roof. The loons from all over the lake gather at our end to make their travel plans before heading south to do whatever they do all winter. These loon conventions are called “stagings.” We watch them practice their take offs and landings on the open stretches of the water and we hear them yodel in flight.



It is a pity that summer has to end. But each summer’s memories help us through the rest of the year so that we have something great to look forward to. We do take some of the summer bounty with us when we leave. We harvest the cranberries by the shore to make jelly for our Thanksgiving dinner. And the blueberry jam we’ve made for our English muffins will last all winter. Leaving is bittersweet. Time to paint my toenails red and head back

Departure Day!

Today’s the day! Finally, it’s time to leave for Maine. On Friday, we’ll get to our camp on Little Sebago Lake. I will open the door to a smell so evocative that I wish it could be bottled up to enjoy in the winter. It is composed of pine wood, mildew, old books, moth balls, sand, and sunlight. It is the smell of my childhood summers and of all the summers of my life. I once read that the sense of smell, of all the five senses, is the strongest for tapping information stored in long term memory. A smell has the power to tap into one’s forgotten history, and the memory of a smell can transport one directly into the past. I can remember the smell of wet wool socks drying on the wood stove . . . whiskey in my grandfather’s glass . . .sun tan oil (no SPF in my childhood, we used iodine emulsified in baby oil to enhance the natural tan) . . . the smell of my mother’s ironing our cotton sheets. . . the sulfur from the match that lit my father’s cigarette.




In theory, opening up camp should be easy. The boat has been delivered out of storage to our driveway. We hired someone to clean up the yard, what there is of it, and to put in the dock. All our clothes are already there. The food staples are in the cupboards, sealed in airtight canisters. We should be able to walk in the door, flip on the breakers, carry a few nests of baby mice out into the woods, and then be good to go. I’ll let you know how it goes!