Returning to Fintry

I was eight years old when my parents purchased the small property on the lake and constructed a summer house.

In those early years before the connector highway was built, the car trip took more than seven hours from the Fraser Valley where we lived, over the coastal mountain range that forces the clouds – saturated with moisture from the Pacific Ocean – to rise and empty.

I could always smell the difference in the dry atmosphere as we entered the Okanagan Valley. The arid air held the scent of pines and the fragrance of orchards that were irrigated by the lake, deep blue, shimmering silver on its surface.

Our destination was a grassy delta named Fintry, which during the last century was a productive apricot and apple orchard. By the time we first arrived in the early 70s, the fruit trees had long been cut down, and only the spruce, pine, and poplar trees by the water’s edge remained. Then and now, the delta is a flat few hundred acres of dried grass and tumbleweeds wherein cricket concerts reverberate each summer evening.

In the early part of the century a wharf was built for the barge that would travel up and down the lake’s endless shoreline. Here the barge would stop to collect the crates of apples from the orchard.

But more exciting than the old abandoned wharf was the candy store at the marina, our childhood source of dripping popsicles, five-cent bags of penny candy, even a carton of Noca milk and a loaf of Wonderbread if our mother ran out of staples. As we tied our outboard motor boat to the dock, I loved how the swelling waves rolled towards shore and slapped the side, causing us to bob.

And I loved the rainbow that formed on the surface when the tank was full and droplets of gas leaked into the lake. The gas jockeys were tanned boys and girls with bleached hair, whose work uniforms were bathing suits. I wondered then how a teenager could be so fortunate to have a summer job like that! Pumping gas and selling candy by the lake.

Now the marina is gone; the dock is dismantled. When I see a spectrum on the water I feel a twinge of guilt. And, during my children’s teen years, their summer jobs involved bussing tables, sorting materials in the scrap yard, farm work, and tree planting.

However, family time at the lake remains a highlight.

I’m an adult in mid-life, preoccupied with all the responsibility this entails. But the Fintry house still invites me to shed my other self along with my shoes, to run barefoot and to live without concerns (the sound of the screen door slamming frequently) until the late August winds bring autumn’s chill, remining me that summer, like all good things, must come to an end.

I’ve returned to Fintry each year with my children since their infancy and have watched them grow from unsteady toddlers with disproportioned bodies, to teenagers, lean and strong, to young adults making their way in the world. Here, they’ve been kissed awake by the same sun and lulled into their deepest sleeps by the same moon.

I realize that while things cannot remain the same, some things never change. The waves continue to lap up onto the beach wearing the rocks into smooth round pebbles. Some are worn into flat stones ideal for skipping, a pastime that my boys have perfected over the years. At first just plopping handfuls of pebbles into the water as babies do, then the skilful side-armed flick-of-the-wrist technique that skips the stone; quick light slaps leaving a trail of concentric circles that grow and grow until they dissolve and then mysteriously vanish altogether. Just like youth.

But the sun that warms my bones has also creased my skin, cleverly imprinting years of contentment and laughter around my eyes and mouth – a keepsake of the past.

And clinging to the hillside by the road to the lake is an apricot tree, now ancient and wild – a reminder of the delta’s past life. Each summer my father takes his empty ice cream buckets and fills them with the tree’s still succulent yield. Determined, he climbs the gnarled branches. The old tree is worthy of such effort.

Mother takes the amber fruit, as well as ripe black cherries and crisp apples from the tall trees in their yard and recreates the childhood pleasures of flaky pies and glistening jams. We gather around her summer table at the lakeside and, like a ring that forms on the water’s surface when a stone is tossed, our circle expands as spouses, grandchildren, and friends are added.

At Fintry, life is simpler for awhile, and I contemplate my need for this constant place as I engage the changes in my life – as I acknowledge my own “summer’s end.”

How fitting the words of E.B. White’s essay “Once More to the Lake”:

Summer time, oh summer time, pattern of life indelible, the fade proof lake, the woods unshatterable, the pasture with the sweetfern and the juniper forever and ever, summer without end . . .

Late August brings the autumn winds to the lake, ruffling its surface, and in the winds the cool air signals the approaching harvests of September.

Connie’s writing has appeared in Sophia Wisdom, Rhubarb, and Half in the Sun: Anthology of Mennonite Writing. She attends Northview Community Church, Abbotsford, B.C.