As a child, I would spend my summers on the coast of Maine: sailing, enjoying picnics on nearby islands, and looking for shells or colorful glass at low tide along the rocky ocean beaches. On the way to and from the train station and then airport, we would pass by a lake or two. But did I notice? No. They held no interest.

When I married a man from Canada, his sister and husband invited us to visit them on their lake in Saskatchewan. Lake? Okay… I guess so. I had no idea about lakes, much less, in Canada.

We flew to Montreal. Then Saskatoon. Then took a tiny plane to the Lac La Ronge Airport, where a bus took us into town along the shore. Neil and Susan met us in their boat the first year, later years we took a sea plane to their island. We motored. And motored. And motored.

Where was this island? I realized, this was not what I understood a lake to be. This was a LAKE.

I understood now why the groceries that Susan and Neil and their 2 children loaded onto the boat that day were the food we would eat til we returned. Unless we caught fish. Or picked what might be growing in Susan’s garden.
We landed at the dock a good 45 minutes later. There was the house that Neil and Susan had built: They had selected and taken down each tall tree, stripped it, used their own savvy ingenuity to build this work of art. It was not a small building – tall, high, and full of light. Beautiful.

It took time to take all this in.

It reminded me of my reactions to my time in Yugoslavia years earlier. How I had lived in a country that had paved streets, not cobblestone; that had grocery stores, not outdoor markets; that had cars, not donkeys; that had electricity and plumbing and didn’t socialize every afternoon on the streets.

I had assumed a “lake” was small, not immense; that there would be boats passing by and social interaction with others on the lake, not so far from town or… other people. I knew how to sail but nothing about fly fishing. My “craftmanship” abilities extended to stretching a canvas, not the ability to build a beautiful house on an island in the middle of a huge lake. In Maine and Virginia, and every place I’d lived, I would orient my sense of direction by the silhouette of mountains; here there was open sky.

But that summer. And the summers after, until child #3, when it was too hard to travel and fit into a sea plane, I fell more and more in love with that lake. And when travel became the difficult factor, I began looking for a lake closer to home. A lake within driving distance of Brookline.

As different as this lake is from the far away, remote, expansive and beautiful Lac La Ronge, I still love it. I love it because I learned to love what a lake can offer: the swimming, the wildlife, the boathouse that sits right at water level (no tides to influence that, just rainfall so I can hear the sound of water all summer long.

I owe my “lake love” to the generosity of Susan and Neil for And those isummers in the middle of Saskatchewan. Remember the ridiculous games we played? In the middle to that glorious lake. So much fun.

” Someday the water will be warm enough for swimming.”