Every summer for roughly 10 years, my Parents would take us on a family vacation to the lakes region of New Hampshire, a small resort on Lake Winnipesaukee with a few dozen cottages, boat docks, a game room, restaurant and lounge all there for the tourists to enjoy. Mornings we would often rent a motor boat and go water skiing, or trek out to the towns of Wolfboro and Laconia. It was a classic postcard of Americana from the 1970's, and I loved nearly every moment I spent there.
As we got older, my brothers graduated school and had moved out of the house. Leaving me as the only child coming along with my parents. Soon I would be graduating as well, and we would stop going on vacations together. The '80s had arrived and things wrapped up in quiet fashion. I still miss those days, as I was coming of age as a young adult, with new interests and hobbies.
Among my interests as a young teenager, was a girl my age who was vacationing with her family in one of the nearby cottages. Anne was a pretty brunette with a nice figure and stood about my height. We became friends and sent letters to each other the entire year in between vacations. I'm not sure whose idea it was to start the correspondance, but she would send me class pictures of her and I was soon developing a huge crush. I was devstated that she did not feel the same way, as she revealed in one of her letters, and I stopped writing to her as a result. She continued to write to me however, and soon lifted my spirits back up with promises of a potential romance as the summer grew near.
The next summer arrived. Me all of 13 years old had high hopes to see Anne again, but when we finally did, my anticipation was stopped cold as she once again revealed she did not have feelings for me. I quickly retreated to the cottage, locked myself in my room and cried my eyes out for the rest of the day. Not having a girlfriend before, I was completly unsure what had taken place, but it was evident that she merely liked the attention and nothing more. My attitude toward her immediatly changed, and although I tried to remain friends with her for the remainder of our two week stay. I would not again try to make any romantic advances, and eventually turned my attention to other girls that were vacationing there.
The final summers in New Hampshire I ended up spending by myself, taking the boat on solo runs and playing arcade games alone. I had a couple of girlfriends back home over the years and so my interests were preoccupied. But I would occasionally run into Anne and not have much to say beyond hello. The final year I spent there with my family, she was nowhere to be found. Word had spread that her father passed away, and I sometimes wandred around the resort thinking about her. The last image I had of her was at age seventeen, smoking a cigarette and looking kind of sad.
I returned on my own to New Hampshire over the years when I was performing with my band on the Mount Washington cruise ship, and the old resort slowly lost its identity. The game room, once having pinball machines and video games, was now reduced to a ping pong table and an unplugged jukebox. A dozen or so years later, the restaurant and lounge closed, the cottages were leased for the summer, and only a few motel units could be rented. I returned by myself in 2018, newly divorved after being married for 25 years. Memories of my childhood and teenage years came flooding back. My mother had passed away a few years earlier and my father was in an assisted living facility. Life was very different for me, and an emptiness dominated over me for most of that year.
The stillness of water in early October, the final week of the season before the motel shiut down, I walked around the mostly empty resort and found some comfort in the quiet. By the end of that month, I was in a new relationship, and a few years later, I took my girlfriend to stay at the beach motel, which would also soon close to the public and become privately leased condos. We walked around the place holding hands as I pointed out the various cottages and told her stories from my childhood.
Every summer, I still think about the days I spent with my family, and all of the people I recall hanging out with. I thought about Anne now and then, and recently checked online to see if she was on Facebook. Having sent letters back and forth long ago, I eventually searched he name and the town she grew up in, and was saddened to learn she had passed away 10 years ago from cancer. A page out of my childhood memories was seemingly torn out, grossly re-written and put back in with scotch tape. I recall once time I was playing with her by the beach at thirteen and briefly holding hands on the dock before diving into the clear blue water. I could not help but feel a deep empathy for her family, her husband and adult children, and for what she must have gone thru. I recognized her face immediately, and knew it was her.
A chapter in my life that had already long closed along with the doors to the resort I had come to know so well. Where the remainder of friends I made are today is anyones guess, but we'll always be seventeen in my mind.
