GIFTS FROM THE LAKE

The above photo is from my Mom's blog. These are the stairs that lead down from the lake house toward the water. At the bottom there is usually another portable set of stairs which drop another 4-5 feet down to the shore. The portable stairs have been pulled up in the above photo. The amazing thing is that right now you could use the landing at the bottom of this flight of stairs as a boat launch. Every spring the lake (Lake Champlain) rises dramatically as a result of snow-melt and rain, but this appears to be a banner year with lake levels rising far higher than I have ever seen. This has caused some headaches for my folks who live there seasonally, although nothing like those poor folks living in the Mississippi's flood zone. The biggest headache is that my folks haven't had water because the lake rose up high enough to compromise their spring house.

However, there is definitely a positive in all of this. As a boy, when the lake house belonged to my Grandma and Grandpa McCuen I used to love to roam the shore looking for treasures that had washed up in the spring. Over the years I found duck decoys, fishing lures, bobbers by the hundreds, toy boats, wooden signs, dock sections, etc... Once I even found a dollar bill deposited in the branches of a bush along the shore. Some of the greatest treasures though are not washed up trash. There are some pretty spectacularly shaped pieces of driftwood, and once I found an arrowhead that had been washed from an eroded bank by the lake's battering waves.

I think that this year's flooding can only mean that the lake will slip in and grab even more loot than in years past. This is going to be a great year for beach-combing! In the fall, people left real bonafide treasures  in places that they felt confident would be safe from the lake's fingers, and right now those treasures, big and small, are being driven along by the waves toward the shore beneath the house. By the middle of summer the lake will have receded enough that any enterprising soul could go for a walk and come back with gifts from the lake.