DECEMBER 26, 2021 – Yesterday, my wife and I “celebrated” Christmas alone, with limited, indirect contact with the outside world. After a delectable mid-afternoon dinner of ham, scalloped potatoes, Brussels sprouts, and rolls with butter and honey, I continued my “sift and sort” operation focused on lots of ancient paperwork; all part of the bigger exercise of “getting one’s affairs in order.”
Among the mounds I found a print-out of an essay I’d written years ago for our lake association newsletter. I remembered the circumstances that inspired the story as if they’d happened yesterday . . . which, at the same time, seemed so very long ago.
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Once upon a time, while I was a small guest at my grandparents’ cabin, I badgered Grandpa to “take me out in the boat with the motor.” It was a modest request but only after two or three days did Grandpa relent. In his opinion the quietude of the lake wasn’t to be disturbed except now and again, and he certainly favored the law back then, which prohibited motorized trolling. One of his “now and agains” came after dinner one evening, when he hauled his old four-horse Blue Ribbon Champion down to his 12-foot Alumacraft, helped my grandmother and me aboard and took us for a ride to the islands and back. A simple outing, the trip formed a memory I shall savor always. It seemed like an expedition, an adventure to some uncharted part of the world, and when my young eyes surveyed my grandparents’ place from a distance, their land assumed a mystical quality. I fell in love with it then and have been in love with it since.
Recently, my two young sons asked, “Can we go out in the boat with the motor?” I resisted at first, but then I recalled the memory of that boat ride nearly four decades ago. Without another word, I dragged Grandpa’s old boat out from under the trees and launched it into the quiet waters he loved so much. I pulled from storage our old eight-horse Mariner, and when my boys complained it was “only an eight,” I recounted my story about their great-grandfather and how lucky they were to have a motor twice the horsepower of the antique Blue Ribbon Champion. We loaded up the boys’ fishing gear and headed for the waters out from my grandparents’ cabin, which is now the cabin of my sons’ grandparents. In the day’s golden hour, my sons fished quietly and observed the world around them—a loon gliding nearby, regal pines guarding the shore and calm water reflecting a Maxfield Parrish sky towering above.
In those peaceful moments, I said little and hoped a lot; hoped my sons understood that however fast the world might turn, the lake taken slowly brings contentment. I suppose Grandpa’s old Alumacraft will be retired someday, and my old eight-horse will join his four-horse in the antique display, but will Grandpa’s love for Grindstone—and the way he loved it—live on? I think so.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
