Hunt's Pond has been our second home for 24 years. In fact, it has felt more like "home" than anywhere else. We are surrounded by people that know and support us, people that we consider more family than friends. The MacPeeks that we love and grew to know as surrogate grandparents, the Budds who have brought more happiness and joy to our lives than we can ever say, the people who have marked milestones with us and pepper our memories with their laughter and kindness.
In the past year, we have lost many remarkable friends. We have felt this loss profoundly and in ways that we never expected. The community has changed shape, and as pillars fell, we have fought to find our footing again, all the while knowing that it would never feel quite the same. This weekend, we felt that too-familiar pit of despair in the backs of our throats. And in that moment just before the tears come to wash the screaming anger back down into your heart, I thought about how on a beautiful late summer afternoon, the staccato exclamation of someone's sadness can change so many people's lives. I wondered aloud in the suffocating sunlight how and when people stop seeing beauty in the world, especially when they are responsible for so much of it.
I thought back to my own understanding of this small community. I thought of my childhood and what it was to grow up knowing what it felt like to have 30 people wrap their arms around you at once. Selfishly, I thought about how I want my children to know that same sense of togetherness, where neighbors meet on the beach for an impromptu swim, or cruise down the lake with boats tied together. I long for the same wonderful people that taught me these lessons to carry them to future generations, but I know that they cannot.
There will be different people, different lessons, different laughter, and the responsibility is ours to carry onward. We must tell the story of a wonderful man named Mr. Budd who created a community of family and friends, who made the best Cosmo I've ever had, who loved to laugh and was full of gentle and kind words, and whose love for us was even more full that the Christmas trees that he grew. I will tell them that there was a man named Smitty who made our little village a safe place to be, who loved to laugh and tell stories, who loved to fish and respected nature's balance.
And I will tell the story of a man named Andy, whose talents and generosity made everything he touched beautiful, who loved watching Tugger scamper off with one of his gloves, who did all of the jobs that noone else wanted to and did them with pride and perfection. I will tell them of a man whose sense of fairness was more clear than anyone that I've known, and truly left everything better than he found it.
And I will tell them of a warm, lazy afternoon in late August when we realized that it had all ended, and that we had to rebuild and heal the hurt that we were all feeling. When we realized that community is not a product of picnics, snow removal and beach dues. When we renewed our responsibility to one another and moved forward, hand in hand.
"Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them....
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
I am haunted by waters."
