The summer of 2017 was weird. For more than 30 years we’ve been looked forward to spending the entire summer at our place on Wellesley Island in the 1000 Islands. Our first shot at it was great but it didn’t play out exactly as we envisioned.
First, upon arrival, we found that the long-feared St. Lawrence River flooding had arrived. The entire male extended family pitched in to sandbag the property. The flooding was a hassle for the entire summer and we didn’t get any of the boats on lifts or the entire dock in the water. However, in the grand scheme of things we had it easy compared to the victims of hurricanes down south.
In late 2015 we tore down our “hotdog stand” cottage that we’ve had since 1986 and built a new 2 story building on the same small footprint. It kind of resembles the Weasley house in the Harry Potter movies. Being building DIYers, we elected to finish the building ourselves and when we arrived in early May, we still had two unfinished bedrooms and several significant projects to finish before all the kids and grandchildren arrived in late June. It ended up being a frantic 6 weeks of construction that finished at 10pm the night before the 1st arrivals.
We hosted our first Gramma/Grampa camp for our four oldest grandchildren for the month of July. It was like a summer camp complete with boys and girls dormitories. It was great to have them and we believe they all had a great time. Unfortunately, it was all complicated by Suzanne, who tripped over a sandbag and broke her foot. It wasn’t the simple kind. It was a “list frank” fracture that required surgery with screws and plates. It also required weekly trips back to Rochester that we found logistically challenging. It also required Bill to become her bonded man-servant. Because she couldn’t put any weight on it, she had a knee walker that looks like an elevated scooter. As of mid December, she’s walking reasonably well, but it’s normal for this type of injury to take more than a year to fully heal.
The event of the season was our daughter Kelly’s wedding to Luke Rosnick in West Hartford, Connecticut. It was a fabulous wedding and an opportunity to reconnect with a lot of people we hadn’t seen for a while. Of course, we could not have been happier to have Luke formally join our family. Like our two other son-in-laws he is highly intelligent, has a great sense of humor, hardworking, loving, a perfect match for his spouse, and a person of great character. And also, like his fellow Beamish in-laws (AKA “Brothers Coleslaw”) he comes from a fantastic family.
In September, we took the RV out of storage and went to Maine and Connecticutt for a few weeks and then returned to “the Islands” for a few weeks before closing up for the season and heading south. We looked forward to spending more time on the River in the Fall and it was everything we thought it would be – serene, cool, and very quiet. There were times that I doubt there was a single human being within a mile of us. I’d go nuts if this went on my than a few weeks, but for 3 weeks it was fantastic. One of the things that we didn’t expect was the emergence of the “locals”. Once all the seasonal people leave, the full time residents “take back the river”. I might term it a “sub-culture” but I’d guess that it would offensive to them.