Yup! Summer is definitely over.
Cool temperatures find me back in Toronto, for the autumn. The winter. I stayed at the lake for the better part of September. Was swimming up to 3 times a day, as recently as two or three week ago, with my wet suit on anyway. The changing colour of the fall leaves was very sensational this year, orange, red, yellow splashes everywhere. The leaves piled up on my trailer deck requiring frequent sweeping. I didn't rake them a lot, the leaves make for good fertilizer, til spring rolls around again. They were a constant reminder that summer is over, even for those of us who didn't need to go back to school or work after the Labour Day long weekend.
Ontario has 4 very distinct seasons. We often take them for granted. It's a part of the provinces rugged northern beauty. I am looking out from my condo balcony here now in Toronto over the Humber ravine, where the autumn colours are still exploding in all their majestic glory. The other night I could hear the flocks of geese head south. It's clockwork; time for them to migrate south again just like they do every year. Huge flocks of them. With a last circuit of the pond, flapping thunderously overhead, they then disappearing off over the horizon. Arriving and departing with the nice weather. Soon, I will be heading south too. I should be getting back to the Cuban Schools, check out how everything is going this year. Maybe teach a bit. Hold meetings in the shade of the palm trees beside the pool at the Melia Santiago hotel. But I get ahead of myself ....
I've been busy "wood shedding" so to speak. On the one hand, I got a bush cord of hardwood, halved, quartered and stacked for next year. Winterized the water pipes and so on. Put everything away in the trailer and shed for the year and drove back to the city. It was getting too cold to be pleasant really. I am not partial to colder climes.
On the other hand, for awhile on the colder, wet days I just stayed inside and wrote. Off in the woods a bit back from the beach, most everyone gone with the summer. It was quite productive! Really, the trailer is more like a house in size and amenities. I was hardly roughing it. So be it. It was quite nice, I could stop and go according to my muse. With nobody around I could totally do as I please. Got the Bob Marley + the Wailers album reviews started. Redrafted two articles I've been wanting to redo for sometime now. Thought of a few other things I'd like to blog about too, to keep it interesting around here. Not just school and politics all the time.
I will miss summer by the lake; swimming, hiking, boating, and fishing the seemingly endless days away. Just hanging out with my buddies doing stupid guy things all day and late into the night. Not quite a "Trailer Park Boys" scenario, but pretty close sometimes. No Rick, Julian, Bubbles or J-Rock around but we had our laughs. Beach bumming the days away. Lazy afternoons snorkeling for lost tackle, driftwood and cool looking rocks along the lake bottom. The lads diving off the fishing boat looking for mermaids one night after drinking too much hooch. High times, laughs and lotsa good times, tunes and scheming around the camp fire late into the night. Nobody around to tell us to behave. Put on a shirt. Be nice. Aaaaah those were the daze! I miss it all ready.
Trailer Park Daze: J to the R.O.C?!?
This was my first summer in the Land of the Lakes. The locals tell me it was one of the coolest in recent memory. However, it was warm enough to be outdoors most of the time, which I have long missed living here in downtown Toronto. Now I can enjoy the best of both worlds; country life and the buzz of the big city. Being back in Toronto, doing city things is not so bad when the cold weather rolls around again. It's what I have always done for as long as I can remember. Yup I'm a good old Toronto boy, born and bread. Now I have the option to come and go as I please according to the weather without having to hop on a jet or whatever.
For the longest time I hated the arrival of fall. It meant the days were getting shorter, the nights longer. With the cold weather came another year of school. Busy busy busy. Now I can just relax and take it all in stride. Summer is still best. I will have many happy memories of this one to keep me warm late into the winter nights ahead. There will be more to look forward to next spring. Maybe when Janet retires in a few more years we could get a place down south, join the other Canadian snowbirds in Florida or somewhere else that's warm. The trailers 40 feet long, too long to hitch up and drive back and forth with each year, but we will have to consider our possibilities.
Lake Mississaganon: Land of the Lakes
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