Chautauqua vignette

Labor Day at Chautauqua is quiet and wonderful in its emptiness. A week or two earlier, when the Season is still in session, there's a melee of people, milling about. On the Fourth of July, when i was here last, nearly every house had a flag blowing in the breeze from the lake. Little kids from the Children's School dressed up like the statue of liberty or presidents and marched to the Amp for patriotic songs and waved lots of little flags. But today, they are only here in ghostly memories, years, even decades eliding. My grandson, my son, my husband, his mother and aunt and uncle all experienced these celebrations of a nation in this place.

Today the lake has a haze, water being drawn by the sun, up into clouds that are first filmy like the tutus of dancer, and then become cumulus, more like pom-poms. I watch sailboats tacking into the wind, fishing boats, speed boats trailing a ruff of white foam behind them. There is the labored puffing of the old Chautauqua Belle, a steam powered stern wheeled paddle boat. And the squeal of seagulls as they wheel across the blue sky and dip into the silvery tips of waves.

The gingerbread houses are vacant mostly, now, emptying one after another, into the open trunks of SUVs. There are beds of blue hydrangeas going to seed. Around the bend in the road there are vines with bright orange-red octagonal "Japanese Lanterns" and if you wait long enough, the sumac at the end of Hurst turns bright red like a stop sign. The sun is heavy, warm, but not hot. As though weary of the summer's effort and desirous of a break. High in the cedars there are orange and golden boughs, and the maples are red-tipped, some of the branches that have been stressed. There is the steady droning of crickets and locusts as though to reassure us of their presence. But early this morning, I heard a gaggle of Canadian geese forming up for their journey southward. Time for me to leave. To turn my hand to work and other things. I go with a backward glance.