It’s around 8:00 in the morning and Trish and I are sitting down by the lake.  The sun is up.  We hear the birds and squirrels chirping and calling, as well as the occasional fish snapping up the bugs that buzz just above the lily pads on the lake surface.  Nature is very peaceful, but not quiet. You have to sit very still to pick out all the little sounds around you.  One of those sounds is the rustle of a chipmunk working its way towards us. It never takes a direct route, protecting itself by skittering this way and that.  Trish is sitting on the dock, at the ready with her phone camera.  I’m sitting on a bench just off the dock, under the shade of a tree, with a peanut in my hand.  A bag of them sits next to me on the bench.  We need a plentiful supply.  We are training the chipmunks down by the lake to take peanuts from our hands.  It’s a slow process that requires a lot of stillness and patience.  Perfect activity for a few days at the lake.  And a perfect place and time for a writer to tease her next essay out of her brain.

I’ve been writing about the concept of Community in my last couple of essays and this one continues on that theme.  First, I wrote about how generally insular we’ve become, how the pandemic has just made that worse, and about how giving things away using our local Buy Nothing group has given me some connection to our local community.  (For those who read the Buy Nothing essay, you’ll be happy to know that I had a nice chat last week with Steve, the guy who took all of my Great Courses DVDs, when he stopped by to claim a few items from our garage purge “curb alert”.)  Then, last time, I wrote about how important rituals are in binding a community together and how we’ve lost so much of that in these last decades.  This past week, spending time at this magical lake that has played such an important part in Trish’s life, I’m finding myself reflecting on the importance of shared history and how that binds people together into a community that can span generations.

We’ve been down here about an hour or so this morning.  The chippy is getting a bit more comfortable or at least less nervous.  I started by scattering some peanuts on the ground when we got here yesterday.  They were gone this morning, so I scattered a few more in an arc around six feet from me.  One by one, those peanuts were stealthily snatched up as the chippy worked its way in using its random stop and go pattern, stuffing a peanut into its cheek pouch and then skittering back off to the den to store the peanuts for winter.  The next test was a big one—I put a peanut on the toe of my sneaker.  While we waited for the chippy’s next approach, Trish and I watched a grey heron land on the lily pads at the end of the lake and start fishing.  And we talked about our conversation from the day before.

I had been expecting to have the small lake to ourselves during our weekday visit.  The lake, about a mile long by half a mile wide, is ringed by rustic cabins (read: outhouses) that rest on state game lands.  It is indeed quiet this week, just not empty.  We stopped in on her uncle, ultimately hosting a small happy hour to visit with his wife and him.  We went for a walk after dinner, stopping in on another couple whom she’s known for decades.  We then chatted until dark, on a dock by the lake, with their daughter, now married to the son of another “lake family”.  We are staying at the cabin owned by our stepdaughter and her family.  She grew up at this lake with Trish, playing with the girl who is now the woman with whom we were talking.  Connections run deep here.

All of these conversations were about shared history of the lake.  Trish’s father helped build several of these cabins when he was a boy scout.  She spent summers in the cabin her family owned and eventually owned a different cabin on this lake herself.  Cabins were passed on to children in Trish’s generation and now their kids are taking ownership and raising their own kids here on summer weekends and vacations.  As the sun set on our conversation that night, this woman was talking with Trish about sitting down together and capturing Trish’s oral history of the lake community.  She wants her generation and the generations that follow to understand their deep connection to this place and the people they see here. 

Back in “the day,” most people didn’t move very far from their families and where they grew up.  Even if their own household wasn’t multi-generational, relatives lived close by and neighbors were involved in each other’s lives.  Families were raised together and shared history was passed down, generation to generation.  Whether you realized it or not, you felt a part of something bigger than yourself.  Maybe it was just your extended family.  Maybe it was the neighborhood you lived in.  Certainly, we’ve become more mobile over the decades.  In addition to being distant from our extended families, we seem to have gotten into the habit of not really engaging much in our local communities.  Our stories don’t go back generations.  Our sense of ownership stops at what we physically own ourselves because we have little connection to anything else.  For this little lake community, understanding the history and their connection to it is what engenders a sense of responsibility to not just their cabin and what they own, but to the community as a whole.  And feeling responsible for the well-being of your community is critical to that community’s health.  I think that’s what we’ve been missing these days.  We don’t feel responsible for each other.  We’ve either lost our shared history or never took the time to learn the local history and become part of it. 

By the end of our few days at the lake, I’ve gotten the House Chippy to take a peanut directly from my hand.  It’s important to sit very, very still as the chippy approaches.  It can take five minutes or more for him to work his way up to you.  I only seem to have patience like this at the lake.  He would have climbed up into my lap, but I was wearing shorts and he kept sliding back down my shin.  Next time, sweat pants.  I’m training this chippy not just for my own enjoyment but also so that others can sit here and have the little thrill of this wild animal (admittedly adorable) feeling safe enough to approach me and interact with me.  It’s something people who have lived on this lake have done since the cabins were built in the 1930’s.  Surely the great-great-(great times x)-grandparent of this chippy had done exactly this with the first owners of this cabin.  If we do things right, the (great times x) grandchild of this chippy will be taking peanuts from hands long after I’m gone.  And whoever is handling those peanuts will be telling their children stories about Trish and me and the importance of preserving this lake community for their own kids.  Hopefully, this sense of community responsibility can extend beyond this magical place.